Literally a vector of values separated by commas.

CSVs are very early form of DataBase that predate RelationalDataBases and PostRelationalDataBases. A CSV (or CSV file, depending on usage) is a series of lines, each containing a series of fields separated by commas. The fields may be of varying length but there must be the same number of every line (otehrwise it's not a vector). The special case of one field per line is a 1-dimensional vector, but most CSVs are 2-dimensional. Mathematical vectors come in dimensionalities higher than 2, but CSVs don't.

When the data in a CSV file contains commas, other characters are sometimes used as field delimiters, the data is quoted or the commas escaped. Most data importers recognise all content within double quotes (") as a escaped and so don't break fields with these.

A CommaSeparatedVector? differs from a SpreadSheet because it cannot contain formulae and from a relation because it can have varying length fields and columns are numbered rather than named. CSVs are FlatFiles because they contain no explicit inter-document references.

Program/Language specific notes:

1. awk(1) uses the -Fn arguemnt to specify the field separator of n and doesn't recognise double quoted strings.
2. XML doesn't doesn't recognise double quoted strings.

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