On 18.12.2010 17:33, Mike Cowlishaw wrote:
>> It is interesting to note that "linein" was used, which means 
>> that the author expected and indicated processing a text 
>> file. Now, a LF or CR-LF sequence on "linein" (and "lineout" 
>> for that matter) are never part of the read data (and 
>> appended automatically with lineout/say when writing textual 
>> data). So text files have been processed in Rexx always in a 
>> different way than binary files (for which charin/charout 
>> would be available), making it easy for the programmer to 
>> process them. I can see that Rexx programmers might therefore 
>> expect automatic BOM-handling on non-ASCII text files, if the 
>> Rexx programmer uses "linein" or "lineout/say".
>>     
> Not true, Rony .. in record-oriented file systems the line-end sequence was 
> (is)
> metadata, and therefore lines could (can) include all 256 byte possibilities. 
>  
>   
Ah, yes, forgot totally about them (special apologies to Les! ;-) !

> In a similar way, UTF8 files could be catered for by (for example)  
> UnicodeIn()
> and UnicodeOut() functions.  But changing the definition of charin and linein
> makes very little sense -- and would surely break many programs: starting with
> the humble 'thex' that lets on see every byte in a file in hex, regardless of
> whether it is normally 'printable' or not. 
>   
+1

---rony


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