Obnoxious postings from Google Groups

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, 09 Nov 2012 12:34:27 +0100, Hans Mulder wrote:

> On 7/11/12 01:13:47, Steven D'Aprano wrote:

>> Hit the J key, and the event includes character "j". Hit Shift-J, and
>> character "J" is sent. Hit Ctrl-J, and the character sent is the ASCII
>> control character ^J, or newline. (Technically, the name for ASCII 10
>> is "linefeed" rather than "newline".)
> 
> Actually, the correct name for this character is OS-dependant: The ASCII
> standard prescribes that if an OS chooses to use a single character as
> its line terminator, then it must be this one, and one should call it
> "newline".  Otherwise, it's name is "linefeed".  So, the correct name is
> "newline" on Posix system, but "linefeed" on Windows.

I find that hard to believe. Do you have a source for this claim?

The ASCII standard has nothing to do with operating systems. It is a 
character encoding system, whether you are using computers or notches 
carved into pieces of wood, you can encode characters to values using 
ASCII. ASCII is operating system agnostic.

Every source I have found describing the ASCII standard, and its 
equivalents from other standards bodies (e.g. ISO/IEC 646, EMCA 6) either 
directly refer to chr 10 as LF/Linefeed or refer back to the C0 control 
codes, which refers to it as LF/Linefeed.

For example:

http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/Ecma-006.pdf

See also:

http://www.terena.org/activities/multiling/euroml/section04.html

which clearly shows char 10 as LF in all the given ISO 646 variants.

If you have a source for this claim, I would like to see it, otherwise I 
will stand by my claim that the standard name for ASCII char 10 is 
"linefeed".


-- 
Steven