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Re: Achieving interoperability in a world where differentOS's

  • From: Rick Jelliffe <rjelliffe@allette.com.au>
  • To: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>
  • Date: Sat, 20 Dec 2014 14:27:31 +1100

Re:  Achieving interoperability in a world where differentOS's

Sure, nothing goes away. A stable business should expect their backend can be kept alive -if evolving- for 20-30 years. I am still working with SGML systems sometimes! They tick away happily: we usually hide them as services behind a POX SOA facade for now.  (And we recently find it easier to find Omnimark developers than Xslt developers with publishing experience: the xslt developers we do find are often database-to-HTML people: so they know nothing about modes, priorities, ids, functions, encodings, predicates or other bread-and-butter document issues.)

One of the simplifications of XML was to move to newlines instead of SGML's Record Start/Record End signals. Off the mainframe and onto the commodity computers.

Do I remember that Digital's VMS OS didn't have text files, only records?

Rick

On 18/12/2014 8:41 PM, "Michael Kay" <mike@saxonica.com> wrote:


On 18 Dec 2014, at 03:26, Rick Jelliffe <rjelliffe@allette.com.au> wrote:

In the first decades of computing, there were two kinds of "newlines".  One was control codes for printers: carriage return and line feed. The other was record start and end signifiers for tape storage: think  COBOL or FORTRAN.

By the 1990s, both kinds of raw newlines had been superseded: drivers hid device details, and Apis took hid drivers.  Newlines were for formatting things on screen or for markup.


Not entirely superseded. UNIX and DOS file systems, and most internet protocols, have great difficulty representing the kind of file that is common on mainframes, where a file is a sequence of records and a record is a sequence of arbitrary bytes, but such files do still exist.

Michael Kay
Saxonica



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