Re: Extraneous form feeds

[Bruno Haible]

Hi,

J William Piggott wrote:
> This project is loaded with extraneous form feeds (FF, 0x0C, ^L).

Quoting Wikipedia [1]:
  "The form feed character is sometimes used in plain text files of source code
   as a delimiter for a page break, or as marker for sections of code. Some
   editors, in particular emacs and vi, have built-in commands to page up/down
   on the form feed character."

> Many, if not all, of them were in the initial commit:

In the ancient times, most editors enabled you to edit one file at a time.
That's the reason why people put a lot of code in a single file - you
cited regcomp.c and regexec.c in particular - and therefore needed a way
to dissect the file into sections or pages. Nowadays it is more common
to distribute the code over several files.

Bruno

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_break