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I wonder if \EOF was around due to punch cards? You maybe didn't want an implicit EOF in case you lost the last card.
by cma 4y ago
I wonder if \EOF was around due to punch cards? You maybe didn't want an implicit EOF in case you lost the last card.
- int_19h 4y agoEOF was around because many early file systems only recorded the number of allocated blocks per file, so some other mechanism was needed to record the precise length in bytes in cases where padding with spaces was not acceptable.
- bombcar 4y agoExactly - think about a tape with multiple files on it - you want some way of knowing you reached the end of a file without having to seek all the way back to some directory.