🚀 go-pugleaf

In <1993Jan4.022937.3932@smoke.marlboro.vt.us> jhood@smoke.marlboro.vt.us (Lord Yertle) writes:

>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.

EXACTLY.  This is spot on.  Listen to this man, people.

>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.

This, I'm not so sure about.  As far as I know, when you are programming
in C with stdio (and I mean *any* environment with a half-way decent
stdio, including non-ASCII machines), each time you open a file you make
a decision about whether this is nominally a text file or nominally a
binary file.

If it's a binary file (you write a 'b' in the second argument to fopen)
you get the bytes exactly as they are on disk.  It it's a text file,
the C library will make whatever conversions are necessary in your
environment to make the file appear as a sequence of lines separated
by '\n' and just stopping at whatever the local equivalent of EOF is.

Strangely enough, on Unix (where C was developed), this text conversion
is a no-op; like converting to network byte order on a Sun.

So the question is whether the file in question is a text file or a
binary file.  If it is a text file, it should obey local conventions.
In the case of MS-DOS, it should have \015\012 (\r\n) separated lines,
and a \032 (^Z) character denoting EOF, which is of course stripped.

I think a news item is (should be) a text file.

Perhaps we should be complaining about Waffle not translating the ^Z
into something innoculous when it *writes* the file (when \n -> \r\n
is done) rather than when it *reads* the file.

But then tell me, what is the MS-DOS convention for quoting a ^Z?
Answer: none.  If there was one, the compiler writers could implement
it as an extra translation for text files (eg: when writing text
^Z --> ???; like \n --> \r\n).  Then the applications wouldn't need
to worry about this rubbish.

-- 
<David.Keegel@apana.org.au>  <werple!tuple!boombox!djk>  Tel: +61 3 593-1460
aka: djk@boombox.apana.org.au, djk@cs.mu.oz.au.  Formerly: djk@bby.com.au.