From: tomas DOT fasth AT twinspot DOT net (Tomas Fasth) Subject: Re: Why text=binary mounts 9 Jan 1998 19:39:23 -0800 Message-ID: <34B67F63.8BC75ABC.cygnus.gnu-win32@twinspot.net> References: <01BD1C69 DOT BBA294A0 DOT tiberius AT braemarinc DOT com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit To: "gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com" Cc: "Gary R. Van Sickle" Gary R. Van Sickle wrote: > > This whole UNIX/DOS/text/binary situation drives me nuts. Why can't this > problem be solved once and for all by everybody for all time? We are > talking about one '\r', for crissake. What's wrong with this solution: Gary, Your solution is wrong because it promotes an out-dated file system concept originated from digital stoneage operating systems. Back then fopen("t") ment character (byte) oriented i/o, while fopen("b") ment block oriented i/o. Back then the choice had an effect on i/o performance. Now? Heck, modern i/o subsystems are _so_ much more efficient and clever. Also, memory (good for i/o buffering among other things) are now-a-days so much more cheap and virtual. What's wrong with this solution: Do it the Unix way. A file is a file is a file. Textual end-of-line is not a business of the i/o subsystem. In Unix the character sequence for end-of-line ('\n' == 012 == 0x10 == 0b00001100) is nothing more exciting than a mutual agreement between tools that want to share text information. How simple! Ultimately, as a programmer you might want to use a library to share commonly used text processing. As a bonus the details of certain strange text processing characteristics (like what sequence of characters to represent end-of-line) can be hidden from the programmer. Good! So, a text processing library is the exactly right place for fixes of os design flaws and differencies such as the use of end-of-line sequence taking twice as much space as necessary. Voila! We're back to where we started. GnuWin32. Please, please, please. Do what you like, but do NOT try to break the Unix way of computing in the GnuWin32 distribution. If you do, then what's the point the whole project? Maybe you're only interested in some groovy tools to filter your poor DOS text files? My advice: get native ports of those tools. There is no port? Sad, but you might have to live with that. If you can't, do the port yourself or switch to a REAL OS (hint: ends with nix :-) > Let me address one sure-to-come-up complaint right now: the notion that it > would be too much work to 'fix' all the existing code. How much time and > effort is wasted on 'working around' the current situation? Certainly more > time than it would take to search-and-replace "w" with "wt", etc. Oh no. Not in this universe. For reasons too many to list. It may come as a surprise for you that the DOS way is not the right way. Life can be cruel sometimes... -- Tomas Fasth mailto:tomas DOT fasth AT euronetics DOT com EuroNetics Operation http://euronetics.com Mjärdevi Science Park Office tel: +46 13 218 181 Teknikringen 1 E Office fax: +46 13 218 182 58330 Linköping Mobile tel: +46 708 870 957 Sweden Mobile fax: +46 708 870 258 - For help on using this list (especially unsubscribing), send a message to "gnu-win32-request AT cygnus DOT com" with one line of text: "help".