Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: line endings with 0.31

[Brian May]

>>>>> "hendrik" == hendrik  <address@hidden> writes:

    hendrik> Just for historical record, this famous Microsoft
    hendrik> "incompatibility" is actually a point in which they
    hendrik> followed the official standard.  ASCII was designed
    hendrik> without a newline symbol; instead, it had a
    hendrik> carriage-return -- which returned the teletype carriage
    hendrik> to the beginning of the current line, permitting it to be
    hendrik> overwritten, and a line feed character, which moved to
    hendrik> the next line while leaving the carriage alone (thus
    hendrik> effectively moving a cursor straight down).

Microsoft, also, initially adopted the standard that ^Z would mark the
end of the file. Apparently this was required (IIRC), because early
filesystems didn't store the file length anywhere, so the ^Z marker
was the only way to tell a reader when it got to the end of the file.

Fortunately, this standard is effectively dead now, and ^Z is only
used when receiving data from the console.

I think it is only a matter of time before the Windows text format
dies too.

Curiously, wordpad on Windows can read Unix format files, but notepad
can't.
-- 
Brian May <address@hidden>