4 ms·
Nothing to see here, just Microsoft continuing stubbornly to do the wrong thing
by naz 17y ago
Nothing to see here, just Microsoft continuing stubbornly to do the wrong thing
- olliesaunders 17y agoYes, if MS changed to use 0xA (AKA \n or LF) then this problem would start to disappear.
- chollida1 17y agoSerious question. Are they doing the wrong thing? Is there a standard that says the only line ending is \n. Is the Mac also doing the wrong thing then but using just \r?
- ajross 17y agoNow, see, that's the kind of ignorance the article was trying to treat. It's very much not microsoft's fault. Early teletypes had two command bytes: "\n" (newline) would advance the paper, and "\r" (carriage return) would move the type head (on a typewriter, the paper carriage -- thus the name) back to the start of the line. If you wanted to do both, you had to send both. So if you have a text file to print, you'll either need to include both command bytes or else have some "terminal driver" software do the translation for you from a single "end of line" marker. This feature was a Unix innovation. It didn't exist in other contemporary systems (VMS, for instance, from which CP/M and MS-DOS stole lots of other ideas). So the problem was that Gary Kildall, in 1977, failed to recognize the great idea Unix had and cloned VMS behavior instead (and Bill Gates likewise cloned CP/M instead of Unix). And due to backwards compatibility pressure we're still living with the result. But it's clearly not a case of someone having made the "wrong choice".
- RyanMcGreal 17y agoI guess posting the article turns out to be valuable if it generates interesting and actually-informative comments like this one.