🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3Ng0VB3w165w@cybrspc.UUCP> roy%cybrspc@cs.umn.edu (Roy M. Silvernail) writes:
>phil@miracle.com (Phil Hill) writes:
>
>> roy%cybrspc@cs.umn.edu (Roy M. Silvernail) writes:
>> >Well, as McLuhan said, "the medium is the message."  You're technically
>> >correct, Phil.  But, as a practical matter, where does one separate a
>> >filesystem from the methods available to access that filesystem?
>> 
>> My point is that Waffle is using the *default* text method to access the
>> DOS files.  If Waffle used binary mode, it wouldn't stop reading at the
>> ^Z.  Of course it's more of a pain to access in bindry mode, you have to
>> manually scan for new-lines.
>
>Granted, but my counter-point is that the default access mode for a file
>should still give you the whole file.  The ^Z kluge is a hangover from
>CP/M.  Just gets in our way.  (anybody running OS/2 that can tell us
>whether HPFS has this artifact?)
>
>> >Besides, the filesystem IS broken.

Misconception alert!

The problem is not in the MS-DOS operating system code.  MS-DOS itself
treats files as dull boring binary streams, just like unix.  (An
exception is character devices, but we're not concerned with that
here, and Unix has lots of its own peculiarities here too.)

The problem is that to stay close to CP/M roots, MS-DOS utilities and
COMMAND.COM (and by extension most other MS-DOS programs) follow the
CP/M convention that text files have CR/LF and end at ^Z.  MSDOS C
compilers optionally do goofy stuff in the libraries to make it all
look like Unix text format inside user programs.  IMHO, it's trivial
to support Unix text format directly (and thus be able to consume ^Z
as text) and so it would be silly for them not to, but the MS-DOS C
compiler vendors aren't listening to me and I'm not using their work,
so I don't know what actually happens with real compilers...

The option of reading a file as text with line breaks or as non-text
data is (or at least should be) unrelated to this conversion goo.

  --jh
-- 
John Hood					Cthulhu-- just imagine it!
jhood@smoke.marlboro.vt.us
Duke U, 1980:  "Okay, so a few systems have the net started. What next?"