Newsgroups: comp.text
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: newline indicator(s)
Message-ID: <1991Feb11.224826.5525@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <7813@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: Mon, 11 Feb 1991 22:48:26 GMT

In article <7813@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM> tut@cairo.Eng.Sun.COM (Bill "Bill" Tuthill) writes:
>... Unix uses linefeed only, MS-DOS uses carriage return
>and linefeed, and MacOS uses carriage return only.
>
>My question is this: do any standards specify how lines should be
>kept apart?  That is, do any of these three operating systems have
>any justification (other than space savings in the case of Unix and
>MacOS) for doing things they way they did?

ASCII gives you a choice.  Normally, CR signifies move back to left margin
and LF signifies go down to next line, so some combination of those two
is the right choice for an end-of-line sequence (bearing in mind that
line boundaries could also be stored as out-of-band data, e.g. length counts,
in which case there *is* no such sequence).  However, ASCII also specifies
that a single character can be used as a line terminator if all parties
involved agree on this, and that if so, it shall be LF, aka newline.

So Unix is doing things right :-), MuShDOS is also technically right but
is doing things the hard way -- a single terminator makes life a lot easier
for software -- and MacOS is unequivocally broken.
-- 
"Read the OSI protocol specifications?  | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
I can't even *lift* them!"              |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry