Windows vs. Linux

[Gerhard Fiedler]

On 2006-08-02 11:29:18, Sybren Stuvel wrote:

> John Salerno enlightened us with:
>> But of course I still agree with you that in either case it's not a
>> judgment you can fairly make 30 years after the fact.
> 
> I don't see Microsoft changing it the next 30 years either... Apple
> moved from \r to \n as EOL character. 

AFAIK there are few programs from Apple's \r era that still work in the \n
era systems, or am I mistaken with this? :)  I also doubt that the line
terminator had any influence in Apple's decision to change their OS. It was
a mere (unintended) side effect, not an objective. If they had chosen a
line terminator, they better had chosen \r\n (the internet email standard). 

Unix-type systems still don't use natively the line terminator that is used
in internet email. Windows-type systems do. So when you want to send a text
file stored on a Unix-type system as email, you have to translate the line
terminations (or vice versa). Just as for MS there are good reasons not to
"fix" the backslash now (what would be a good reason to change it?), there
are good reasons for Unix-type system writers to stick with their
traditional \n.


(From a different message)
> I'm talking about the fact that they have chosen a common escape
> character as path separator.

What's so specifically bad about a "common escape character"? Any character
that has a special meaning in something can be inconvenient when it has to
be used normally. A backslash in a C string, a dot in a regex, you probably
can find examples for any non-alphanumeric ASCII character. 

The only "problem" with the backslash is that you need to escape it in C
strings; I never had any trouble with that. BTW, are you really sure that
the backslash was a "common escape character" in the 70ies? How common was
it back then? Even today, it seems to be mostly a C idiom. (In that
respect, Python is leaning on C, even ever so slightly.)


Get over it... there are any number of definitions out there, some better
chosen than others, and most had a good set of reasons at the time they
were chosen. Mostly by chance, some fit better into the picture some
decades later, and some fit less nicely. Without really getting down to it,
there's no way to tell whether any of the standards was well-chosen. Even
the ones that look now as if they were... could be mere luck.

You're of course entitled to your opinion. I never wanted to doubt that.
But an unfounded opinion usually tells more about the subject than the
object... :)

Gerhard