From: benny AT crocodial DOT de (Benjamin Riefenstahl) Subject: Re: Why text=binary mounts 17 Jan 1998 12:41:19 -0800 Message-ID: <34BCCA37.CC6AE18A.cygnus.gnu-win32@crocodial.de> References: <01BD1F73 DOT B08FDC00 DOT tiberius AT braemarinc DOT com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: "gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com" Hi Gary, Gary R. Van Sickle wrote: > I guess the point I was trying to make is that it doesn't seem to me that > there is a good argument for there to be text processing functionality in > the fopen() family of functions (I know, it's a little late now!). Yeah, that's history, isn't it? fopen() is used for text directly. That seems to be part of the Unix heritage of C and I would think it does have it's advantages. After all the vast majority of Unix tools and Unix-style tools are dealing with text only. > How about this: we say, "we're stuck with > text mode, we'll do better next time, but to alleviate the current > situation, we take the TAL and put it in the fopen() functions, so that > when somebody does a fopen(???, "rt"), they are getting the TAL sitting on > top of a binary stream"? That way all the old programs which are > ANSI-compliant (we've canned those that aren't) get the cool new 'any text > file' functionality *automatically*. Plus, since the TAL is portable, any > new GNUWin's or DJGPP's or whatever also get it automatically. This looks > to me like it solves the problem in the way you were describing, but > doesn't require the addition of another mode. That's basically what I thought. I would try to keep this text mode layer very simple and small though. When you talk about "TAL" in my mind I get the image of some library that does all kind of things even including hooks for stuff like HTML, SGML, and I-don't-know-what-else. Nice, but I would not want it in the basic RTL. OTOH if we are talking about ASCII text, with only support for Unix, DOS and Mac line ends, that would be what I need for ported tools right now. And it's very easy to implement in just a few lines. so long, benny ====================================== Benjamin Riefenstahl (benny AT crocodial DOT de) Crocodial Communications EntwicklungsGmbH Ophagen 16a, D-20257 Hamburg, Germany - 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".