On Thursday 17 March 2005 23:17, Paul Moore wrote:
> <offtopic>
> Ironically, at the lowest level, Windows behaves just like Unix
> (files are pure byte streams) - it's only in the C runtime and
> application code that CRLF issues arise, and that's a
> backward-compatibility hack dating back to the days of MS-DOS.
> </offtopic>
Even more offtopic:
Actually, the CR/LF pair dates back to the ancient teletype writers,
which needed one character for the right-to-left movement of the paper
carriage (hence the literal meaning of "Carriage Return"), and one for
the vertical movement.
I believe it was Tom Swan who, in his "Programming Turbo Pascal" from
the eighties, said something to the effect that "this is not only a
case of the tail wagging the dog, but a tail that keeps on wagging
twenty years after the dog has rolled over and died."
Sorry-for-spinning-of-on-a-tangent-ly yours -
--
Leif Biberg Kristensen
http://solumslekt.org/
