On 1/22/2002 at @816, [EMAIL PROTECTED] quoth: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Chris Devers) wrote: >> stuff alike -- have to either become consistent or agnostic in the way >> they handle line endings, and I'm not at all sure what the best way to >> resolve this is on a general level. Inheriting two more or less opposite >> conventions has been making things way too messy... > >For the record, does anyone here know why the two Steves picked > CR instead of LF back when they started this little company we > hate to love? Is there a practical advantage?
The Mac presumably uses CR because the Apple ][ used CR (although they could have changed it; Apple was never very concerned about compatibility between the two). I've switched to LF on all my text docs now; there's no advantage to using CR. >Similarly, : vs / as separator, the 1901 datestamp, etc. Is the > Steve way actually "better" than the pre-existing Unix way, or > were they being difficult just to "think different"? Regarding separators, / is useful in filenames. (I've got files named, say, "Journal 12/21/1993".) There's no inherent reason why forward-slash should be considered God's Own Directory Separator, although there have been many times I've wished I could use a colon. As fervent as Apple lectured against using pathnames at all, I don't see why they couldn't have picked something nobody ever uses (like, um, backslash). As for the others, I don't think it ever occured to them in 1982-1984 that over 15 years later they'd be merging in a version of unix. I can't blame them for that. Unix and Mac OS were two systems designed for completely different audiences, that grew up in a time where standardization wasn't a very big concern. >If so, that and a time machine would fix the problem. ;) I think that's what we'll need. :) -- Aaron Hall : Bugs> Rabbit season! [EMAIL PROTECTED] : Daffy> Duck season! : Bugs> Rabbit season! : Daffy> Duck season! FIRE!!! Macintosh/UNIX Weenie, Network Flack, and...eh, whatever.