From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Tue Nov 05 2002 - 00:30:57 EST
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
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