Re: Control characters (was: furigana etc.)

From: Thomas Dickey (dickey@herndon4.his.com)
Date: Tue Jul 04 2000 - 16:32:29 EDT


On Tue, Jul 04, 2000 at 11:26:59AM -0800, John Cowan wrote:
> On Mon, 3 Jul 2000, Edward Cherlin wrote:
>
> > *Some* computer system designers, noticing
> > that the demands of printing terminals were not requirements on
> > system file internals, chose to use either CR alone or LF alone for
> > line or paragraph ends, all without coordination.
>
> IIRC, the Model 37 Teletype interpreted 0A as a newline function,
> so ASCII allowed 0A to be interpreted as either LF or NL. (Later,
> these functions were assigned to the separate 84 and 85 control
> characters, but the 80-9F range never really caught on...)
>
> The Unix folks therefore adopted 0A as the internal end of line character,
> conformantly to ASCII rules.

ah. (at the time - mid 70's, we thought it was just part of the overall
approach - having lowercase avoided shifting, short names lessened typing, and
eliminating carriage return made the files shorter).

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey <dickey@herndon4.his.com>
http://dickey.his.com
ftp://dickey.his.com



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