cr, lf, and reading in terminals/vim

[Richard Gaskin]

Brian Milby wrote:

 > The reason for the difficulty is that internally LC uses LF as the
 > line ending.  The cr, lf, and return constants all actually map to LF.
 > When you write a text file, LC will convert line endings to the native
 > format.  So for Windows you get CRLF, Linux gets LF, and Mac gets CR.
 > I take issue with this because as of OS X the native line ending for
 > the OS is actually now LF...

Agreed.

The hard question is: What shall we do about it?

On the one hand, we have millions of lines of code in our community that 
use CR, and a certain percentage of those are dependent on CR having a 
specific value (even if that value is inconsistent with the true ASCII 
value).

On the other hand, we have a constant that suggests it's one thing when 
it's really something else, and at this point that design decision 
benefits no one and confuses many.

Favor backward compatibility, or language learnability/usability?

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
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