Aucb.730
fa.editor-p
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!C70:editor-people
Thu Mar 18 08:40:37 1982
Re: CRLF in Emacs
>From Margolin.PDO@MIT-MULTICS Thu Mar 18 08:38:16 1982
Multics Emacs has several option flags which control its behavior with
respect to saving files not ending in a newline. There is one flag thet
says to query the user, another which says to automatically add a
trailing newline if necessary. The default is to have the first one off
and the second one on, so that naive users (many of whom wouldn't know a
trailing newline if it hit them in the head) don't get screwed by
programs that require a trailing newline. The second one was asked for
after the first one was around for a while, and many users didn't
understand the query that they were getting when they tried to save
their files.
There are other reasons for wanting trailing newlines besides card-image
oriented programs: if your file doesn't end in a newline then your ready
message comes out on the same line as the last line of text when you use
the print command, or other programs (like a line editor) that print out
your text on the terminal. Don't anybody say that these programs should
be smart and print out an extra newline if the file doesn't end in one;
if we were to pull that sort of stunt, we ought to just force the file
to end in a newline in the first place. The contract of the print
program is to reproduce the text of the file on the terminal, not to
trick the user into thinking that the last character is something it
isn't.
Barmar
-----------------------------------------------------------------
gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen <
[email protected]>
of
http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/
This Usenet Oldnews Archive
article may be copied and distributed freely, provided:
1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles.
2. The following notice remains appended to each copy:
The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996
Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.
