Joseph Boyle <Boyle at siebel dot com> wrote: > Newline problems are a good analogy. They still require bookkeeping of > different formats and attention in any new coding and cause new bugs, > even though the problem has been around for decades. Nobody is holding > their breath for any of the platforms to change their newline > convention to match the others or even update all their tools to deal > with the differences - bare LF still doesn't work in Notepad.
Of the hundreds of little utility programs I've written over the past 10 years or so, one of the ones I still use most often is FIXCRLF, which (as you might expect) converts files between different CR/LF conventions. I have to; most text files downloaded from the Internet are LF, but most DOS/Windows tools demand CRLF. It's a shame, but hardly a surprise, that the industry could never standardize on one or the other. The invention of U+2028 LINE SEPARATOR was supposed to relieve us of all this misery -- but ironically, the success of UTF-8 has probably killed LS for good. Not only do people now expect Unicode text files to be backward-compatible with ASCII, which favors CR and/or LF instead of LS, but the single character LS requires more bytes in UTF-8 than the two characters CR and LF. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California
