alt Hacker NewsNo, it was an Apple, Unix, and Microsoft problem.
Unix used LF, Apple used CR, Microsoft used CRLF.
They are all ASCII carriage movement codes, which is about driving the paper feed and print head of an ASR-33 or equivalent.
So they all made the "wrong" decision about what to store in a file.
They just chose different wrong characters.
Replies
flohofwoe • today at 11:28 AM
> Apple used CR
Apple hasn't been using CR since the release of OSX (26 years ago). Microsoft could have made the switch at any time too (just as they could have switched to UTF-8 as universal text encoding on Windows), they just choose not to.
In the end it's not the job of programming languages to clean up Microsoft's mess ;)
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Parodper • today at 11:34 AM
UNIX's LF precedes them by at least half a decade, probably more.
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> They just chose different wrong characters.
Unix followed Multics. Multics chose right. ASCII/EMCA-6/ISO646 drafts discussed this at least as early as 1963¹: “For equipment which uses a single combination (called New Line) [...] NL will be coded at FE₂ [Field Effector 2 = 0x0A].”
¹ doi/10.1093/comjnl/7.3.197