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Postings from November 2000
From: Bart Schuller [mailto:schuller@lunatech.com] > I'd love to hear from people/programs who actually use this "feature". > And wasn't it really DOS or even an ancestor of that that > used it last? Get rid of it! While CRLF conversion is (unfortunately) necessary, terminating the file at ^Z is not. It's a remnant of CP/M, where file sizes were reported in terms of disk blocks, even if the file itself ended mid-block. > Are there functions in the Win32 API that will write a ^Z in textmode? The Win32 API itself treats all files as binary, believe it or not... It's only the C runtime layer which does textmode/binmode distinctions. Ideally Win32 could go all-binmode, just like Unix, but the use of CRLF in text files is too entrenched to easily ignore. Basically, textmode is a "portability" hack to allow Unix code (which sees line ends as \n) to run unchanged in an environment where lines are ended differently. However, more and more Unix systems are being exposed to files in DOS (and other) text formats (via Samba shares, network protocols which mandate CRLF, and the like). Strangely, if more Unix-derived programs were to address the CRLF issue directly, rather than relying on the stdio layer, there would be less need for textmode emulation in the stdio layer on Windows, and there would be more chance of it going away (as if!). Philosophically yours, Paul.Thread Previous | Thread Next