Georg Wrede wrote: > Readln returns a string which contains the line terminator. > > Is there a grand reason for this? > > > Currently there are a few drawbacks with this. The naive user doesn't > expect it, and the seasoned user has to keep stripping it. And then he > has to search the docs (or get hold of other OSs) to determine what > terminator to expect on other systems. > > And it can't really be a speed optimization either, because to do > anything useful with a string, you have to strip the terminator anyway > at some point.
Because if it stripped it, there's no way to know what it was. If you want to do per-line processing but don't want to clobber the line endings, readln has to return the line terminator. Besides which, it's a single function call to strip it off irrespective of OS. -- Daniel