tr problem

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Sat, 2008-06-14 at 20:38 +0930, Tim 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.

I couldn't agree less. The whole root of this problem is mixing up two
completely separate concepts: how to mark an end of line, and how to
display text on some device.

poc