From: Frank Peelo (fpeelo at domain eircom.net)
Date: Wed 24 May 2000 - 12:51:14 IST
> Off topic here, but was there ever a good reason for
> the differences between Mac/Unix/Dos newlines ?
DOS was originally created as a way of porting CP/M programs from 8080 and
Z80 machines. On the terminals & printers originally used with those
machines, CR acted as a carriage return, and would not move to the next line
unless a LF was also sent, while LF moved down a line without doing a
carriage return. So CP/M used CRLF as a line terminator. DOS inherited CRLF
to avoid breaking programs. I assume Unix uses \n because that char would do
the line feed + carriage return on whatever terminals were originally used
for its development but I'll leave further comment on Unix to people more
familiar with its history. And I don't know about the Mac at all.
>
> (is this an old chestnut ?)
Ancient history!
FP
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