Re: [MLUG] text file cr/lf annoyance

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Wed, 2 Oct 2002, Mike Miller wrote:

> On Wed, 2 Oct 2002, Neil Bradshaw wrote:
> 
> > This is so fscking annoying, the whole multiple text file thing. It's
> > like having four companies make writing utensils that only work right on
> > their type of paper. You would think that something so absolutely basic
> > like text files could be the same across platforms just to make one
> > format absolutely universal, but I guess not.

Well, most (or all) of these things are still so relatively young that 
you could insist that it will all shake out to one format.  So, for 
example, I *think* that the Macintosh convention will die out in favor
of the Unix one now that Mac OS is essentially BSD.  As to who might 
eventually "win" between DOS and Unix, I'm not sure I can say.  It could
well be that the whole thing becomes mooted by other encoding strategies 
or something like XML.  Note that we do have universality in some places: 
ASCII rules the 7-bit world.

> > Which system do you all thing is the best designed?
> 
> I guess it's pretty arbitrary.  I like to have one character ending a
> line -- why have two?  Which one should we use?  I don't see an
> advantage to either \n or \r.  The Microsoft way is to use both (\r\n).  
> This actually helps, I think, when a file is transferred to another OS
> because you can still read it pretty readily -- the extra control
> character doesn't foul things up too much.

I think it's useful to remember that the control characters used to have
a built-in semantic value.  A carriage return was just that...but it 
didn't put you on the next line!  Similarly, a line feed would advance
you to the next line, but the print head would not go back to the left
margin.  It was easy to see that in an electronic file, you didn't need
to respect teletype semantics, but then there was ambiguity, so...we
ended up with all 3 logical possibilities.  And we also ended up with:
 
> I don't really understand the VMS method, but it looks pretty
> sophisticated.  I think the OS keeps track of what each file is using
> for line breaks and it deals with the file accordingly, but I guess you
> still have to tell it what sort of file you're dealing with.

VMS is such a *weird* thing.  A lot of cool and interesting ideas, but a
lot of totally baroque weirdness.  And now that it's all but extinct in
the wild, (academia is more like a zoo...) I wonder when it will gain a 
kind of "endangered species chic".  You, now, the kind where Hollywood 
celebs will do PSAs to support the cause.  "Help save VMS," the actress
urges, "an ACL is a terrible thing to waste."

:-)

jking

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