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Re: Achieving interoperability in a world where differentOS's

• From: Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org>
• To: "G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com>
• Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2014 00:12:37 -0500

On Sat, 13 Dec 2014 21:58:37 -0500
"G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com> wrote:

> At 2014-12-13 14:11 +0000, Costello, Roger L. wrote:
> >Each operating system has its own convention for signifying the end 
> >of a line of text:
>
> ... and so I think you should be referring to these constructs as 
> end-of-line sequences and not use the noun "newline".

Note that some systems (include Unix) actually do not require a newline (of any sort) at the end of the last line in a file; it's really just a separator, although the convention is that a newline (actually ASCII LF) at the end of the file is treated as ending the last line rather than introducing an additional empty line at the end.

Traditionally a bunch of Unix utilities went wrong if you did not have a newline (LF, \n) at the end of the file, so the "vi" editor took to warning people if they opened a file like this. The utilities are all (mostly?) fixed and have been for years, but the warning persists.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Achieving interoperability in a world where different OS's represent newline differently
    • From: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>

• References:
  • Achieving interoperability in a world where different OS'srepresent newline differently
    • From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>
  • Re: Achieving interoperability in a world where different OS's represent newline differently
    • From: "G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com>