Agree with what? I consider CRLF to be the best choice, given the limitations 
of ASCII, with RS reasonable if you don't want to support multi-line records.

The Multics developers chose not to use CR because that would have prevented 
overprinting.

If you use RS to separate lines then you can't use it to separate groups of 
lines. There's no equivalent to

  foo <CRLF> bar <CRLF> baz <RS> Tom <CRLF> Dick <CRLF> Harry


--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3

________________________________________
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [[email protected]] on behalf of 
Paul Gilmartin [[email protected]]
Sent: Wednesday, July 28, 2021 11:22 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: FTP distributed system EBCDIC encoded file

On Wed, 28 Jul 2021 14:02:14 +0000, Seymour J Metz wrote:

>The traditional separator was CRLF, but the Multics developers decide to use a 
>single character, and Unix followed suit; I don't know why they didn't choose 
>RS ('1E'X) which, IMHO, would have been a much more sensible choice.
>
I heartily agree.  CRLF is device-bound thinking, akin to Machine Carriage
Control.  Rendering should be the responsibility of the device driver.

And Classic MacOS chose CR because that's the code generated by ENTER on
some programmer's keyboard.

>Maybe the wanted to support multi-line messages?
>
Why couldn't RS have served that function, even as LF operates in UNIX?:
682 $ printf 'first line\nsecond line.\n'
first line
second line.
683 $

-- gil

----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN

----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN

Reply via email to