tr problem

[Cameron Simpson]

On 14Jun2008 20:38, Tim <ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
| On Sat, 2008-06-14 at 19:24 +1000, Cameron Simpson wrote:
| > A line _should_ be terminated by a single character. What that character
| > is is a somewhat arbitrary choice, given that the ASCII table doesn't
| > have an end-of-line (EOL) character, just CR and LF and ASCII was what
| > was there the play with. UNIX went with NL, OS/9 and Macs went with CR,
| > and DOS went with "I'm too dumb to translate text delimiters into
| > printer control actions", thus its CR/NL overspeak.
| 
| Considering that the display of text files is still done over terminals
| where the ability to return to the beginning of the same line and
| overwrite, is a useful feature, there's value in the end of line having
| separate line feed and return characters.  Not all display of text is of
| static text.

Sure, but these are still terminal control actions, and irrelevant the the
data storage. There's value in being able to control the terminal that
way, but not in ending the text line with a pair of terminal control
actions instead of a single character delimiter.

We're talking about static text storage here, not terminal or printer
manipulation.
-- 
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au> DoD#743
http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/

Imagine that CRAY decides to make a personal computer. It contains 16
Alpha based processors executing in parallel, has 800 megabytes of RAM,
100 Gigabytes of disk storage, a resolution of 4096 x 4096 pixels, does
24bit 3D graphics in realtime, relies entirely on voice recognition for
input, fits in your shirt pocket and costs $300. What is the first
question the computer community asks?

"Is it DOS compatible?"