On 2013-02-26 02:08, Michael Torrie wrote:
On 02/25/2013 05:52 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
Nobody is asking anyone to support "every Windows wart out there".
Windows-style line separators are not a wart, it is a convention used by
many, many tools, operating systems, data formats (e.g. email), etc. It
is an old, old convention, going back to teletype days and so predating
not just Windows but also Unix. So in fact it is *Unix* that broke the
convention, and Unix line separators which is the "wart" (or at least a
regression).
That's really interesting. I didn't know that before. It does make
sense. As much as I love unix, it really originated as a hack in many
senses. With that in mind I think Linux should allow a trailing CR in
the shebang line, even if other unix OS's don't. Of course it's a minor
thing, and there are ways of dealing with it.
This is a reminder to me how much we Linux users look at Windows as a
quaint anomaly with it's apparently backwards ways of doing things (like
backslash directory separators, like CP/M did), but forget it is still
the dominant platform out there for general purpose computing. So it
really could be argued that Linux indeed is the backward OS when it
comes to these kind of incompatibilities (though I still think I like it
better!)
That reminds me of the time I was making PPD (PostScript Printer
Description) files. They worked on both Windows and MacOS.
Then Apple released MacOS X, which complained when they were installed.
It turned out that MacOS X didn't like the line endings. It insisted on
CR only, despite the fact that the PPD specification said that the line
endings could be CR, LF, or CR/LF, and that they had followed the
specification previously!
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