Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
On 1/26/11 1:18 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
So CR alone should be available as "go to the beginning of the current
line". LF alone should mean "go to the beginning of the next line".
And that should be it. Unix got this right. CP/M et al got this wrong.
CP/M did not invent that meaning for LF. LF goes back decades earlier
than CP/M.
I mentioned CP/M because it's the first OS that inherited the sequence
without actually being backed up by a paper-based TTY, where a very
weak argument could be constructed that CR/LF is how the mechanics of
the system works.
Are you sure that ASR-33's, DECwriters, Daisy wheels, and glass
terminals were not used with CP/M? They were!
In the early 80's, unix wasn't seen much. The best systems were the DEC
computers, and a lot of software professionals expected DEC to become
the dominant player. DEC operating systems were widely seen as the best.
(IBM was still mired in their ridiculous EBCDIC encoding.)
I suspect that unix and its conventions would be dead by now if not for
Linux.
Be that as it may, in Unix '\n' means "go to the beginning of next
line" and '\r' means "go to the beginning of the current line". I
argued destructively that this is the way things should have been EVEN
on paper-based terminals and NO DISCUSSION the way things should be on
today's terminal emulators.
Unix got this right. CP/M et al got this wrong.
I agree that the Unix way is better. But it is not *wrong* to be
compatible with the enormous inertia of existing practice.
(CP/M worked like RT-11, and RSTS-11, which were enormously successful
minicomputer systems. I have always been amused by the charges that
Microsoft "stole" ideas from CP/M with no mention that CP/M was a copy
of DEC's systems.)
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