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

[hendrik]

On Wed, Nov 22, 2006 at 10:05:13AM +1100, Brian May wrote:
> >>>>> "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.

The cr-lf convention was an ASA/ISO standard in the formal sense.
The ~Z convention never was a standard.  Just the way it was done on 
some ancient OS.  The actual official standard meaning for ~Z, 
incidentally, was SUB; i.e, "substitute", whatever that meant.  Probably 
not EOD, which may have been more appropriately coded as ~D, the 
standard code for EOT (end of transmission).

Maybe Microsoft got to use the actual cr-lf standard by accident.
I suspect ~Z was chosen because Z is tha last letter of the alphabet.

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

Unix uses ~D for this when reading 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>
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Monotone-devel mailing list
> address@hidden
> http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/monotone-devel