[plt-scheme] Help on newline when writing to a file

On Wed, Jan 16, 2008 at 08:36:04PM +0000, Noel Welsh wrote:
> The basic issue is the difference between the representation on a
> newline on Unix and Windows.
> 
> On Unix a newline is always just "\n".  Windows, for some reason I
> cannot fathom, decided that a newline should be the two characters
> "\r\n".  However, when a file is opened in text mode Windows processes
> the port so this two character sequence is read and written as the
> single "\n" as in Unix.  If a file is opened in binary mode this is
> not the case.  All this confusion comes from this design decision.

Not that I would normally leap to the defence of windows, but by
way of historical context: Windows inherited this from MS-DOS,
which inherited it from the common practice in almost every
non-Unix operating system in existence at that time.  It was
Unix, and a particular design decision by Ritchie and Thompson
that the actual mechanics of driving terminals (which is where
\r\n comes from) should be part of a terminal library and not
the text file, that was the innovation.

Note that many, many internet standards (like telnet and SMTP)
that pre-date Windows also specify \r\n end-of-line markers.

Also, just to be different (?), old-school Mac-OS uses just
\r as the end-of-line marker, presumably because that was the
character that you *typed* to end a line.

I've never used an EBCDIC machine, so I don't know what the
convention is, there.  Perhaps someone else can comment?

These issues are real: the world of computing isn't a
monoculture, and software that wants to be portable and
compatible just needs to be a bit flexible.  It's not all that
difficult, particularly if your language runtime has nice
features for handling text specially and smoothing over the
differences from you.

Cheers,

-- 
Andrew