Re: Linefeeds

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From: Michael G Schwern
Subject: Re: Linefeeds
Date: 23:25 on 27 Jun 2005
On Mon, Jun 27, 2005 at 11:04:51AM +0100, Martin Ebourne wrote:
> Of course, if Acorn had used \n for linebreaks instead of \r then the 
> code above would trivially produce \r\n and everything would have 
> matched up with both unix & dos so much better.

\r\n makes sense to me as a newline, historically.  Its a direct translation
of the commands to the line printer.  Move the head to the first column.  Move
down one row.  \n\r makes sense in the same way.  \n I can understand for
Unix as by the early 70s working on displays rather than line printers is
more common and its no longer necessary to give explicit commands.  Though
why they changed it... maybe they just wanted to save one character per line?

But why use \r?  \n I get, "move down one line" and moving back to the
first column is implicit.  But \r... "move back to the first column" and
going to the next line is implicit?  Doesn't seem right.

Unless, of course, they didn't consider 015 to be "carriage return" and 012
to be "newline"?


-- 
Michael G Schwern     schwern@xxxxx.xxx     http://www.pobox.com/~schwern
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