Bill Hanssen writes: > I think the "-ln" > variants made familiar by Pascal and Java were a bad idea, on a par > with the notion of a split between "text" and "binary" file opens.
It's a bit off topic, but it wasn't the languages that introduced the difference between "text" and "binary" files. Pascal defined a difference between "text" and "record" files because the operating systems of the time had two distinct file types. Java initially had only one type (binary files which got automagically converted to a stream of unicode characters) and later modified things to allow manual control of the encoding because "modern" operating systems (like Windows) have two distinct file types. Don't blame the language designers, blame the OS folks. -- Michael Chermside _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
