In the old days, we knew to either open a file in text mode (where whatever the OS had would be converted to a single \n) or in binary mode (where it wouldn't,

In the old days, we knew to either open a file in text mode (where whatever the OS had would be converted to a single \n) or in binary mode (where it wouldn't, and you had to deal with the conversion yourself). IMHO, what SHOULD happen is that if you have a device that has special timing requirements (like the old fashioned printers with no memory), then the driver is responsible for the handling the timing. Adding in weird bits to everyone's files is a bad idea. And yes, I know the difference between carriage-return and new-line. And I know that in the old C specs, "\n" didn't have a guaranteed mapping to either.