Strange field wraps with tabs

[Richard Gaskin]

xavier.bury at clearstream.com wrote:
> Richard said:
...
> You mentioned Sort function crashes.

No, I said that the Sort command yields unpredictable results
when you attempt to use it on strings larger than its documented bounds. 
  This is true of any app where you exceed the limits of the data type 
being handled.

I have a similar problem with my car:  its manual says it only runs on 
unleaded gasoline, but I prefer to pour gravel into the tank.  Damn but 
that crappy car just won't run.  ;)

Neither myself nor any of my few thousand users have reported a crash 
when exceeding the documented limits of the sort command.  It may be 
possible (I suppose it's possible to crash anything when you push it far 
enough outside of what it's described to be able to do), but I've not 
heard of such a case.

While the Rev text engine is not without its limitations, its 
capabilities far exceed those of TextEdit (used across the Mac platform 
at the time Rev's was created), and has arguably fewer limitations and 
bugs than WASTE, one of the most popular text engines used by third 
party Mac apps for more than a decade.  I'm not as familiar with the 
technical underpinnings of Windows text engines, but perhaps NotePad's 
limit of 32k gives us some idea of similar limits there.

There are very few if any practical reasons to present data to the user 
which exceeds 65,535 characters _per line_; that's a lot to ask of a 
user.  Rev has no problem storing and retrieving data up for 4GB, but I 
pity the user of an app which would insist on presenting all of that 
data for the user to read.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
  __________________________________________________
  Rev tools and more: http://www.fourthworld.com/rev