"Richard A. O'Keefe"
According to the ASCII standard, it was fully legitimate to use backspace and carriage return to get over-striking (which is why ASCII includes oddities such as ^ and ` : they really are for accents, and , did double duty as cedilla, ' as acute accent, =\b/ really was not-equals (as was /\b=), &c). According the the ISO 8859 standard, that's not kosher any more. So there are (on Windows and Unix) no known uses for isolated \r characters.
Say what? I use \r when generating output to a terminal when I want to update the current line of output instead of writing a new line. E.g. for tracking progress in my programs. (As a line terminator followed by \n, it would have no effect though.) -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants