[phobos] The time has come to destroy all y'all over CR/LF

[David Simcha]

Forgive my ignorance, but why is this such a big issue?  Shouldn't any
decent programmer tool (diff utility, editor, IDE, etc.) be able to
interpret CR, LF and CR LF as effectively meaning the same thing and do what
you mean?  In the context of source code noone ever wants to go to the
beginning of the current line.  The only time it can become ambiguous is
when a CR LF was actually produced by two different edits with different
settings (and is therefore supposed to mean two newlines, not one) and even
then it only mildly screws up the whitespace.

Bottom line: I fail to see why different line endings should be such an
issue in the first place, unless we're using some overly strict or Stone Age
tool that favors absolute adherence to some specification over common
sense.  In such cases it's more the tool that's the problem, not the source
file.  I don't give a hoot which line ending anyone uses, because all my
tools seem to "just work" regardless, and I have absolutely no clue what
line ending my IDE is set up to use because I don't understand why it really
matters in practice.

On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 2:18 PM, Walter Bright <walter at digitalmars.com>wrote:

>
>
> Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>
>>
>> So CR alone should be available as "go to the beginning of the current
>> line". LF alone should mean "go to the beginning of the next line". And that
>> should be it. Unix got this right. CP/M et al got this wrong.
>>
>>
> CP/M did not invent that meaning for LF. LF goes back decades earlier than
> CP/M.
>
> In the early 80's, unix wasn't seen much. The best systems were the DEC
> computers, and a lot of software professionals expected DEC to become the
> dominant player. DEC operating systems were widely seen as the best. (IBM
> was still mired in their ridiculous EBCDIC encoding.)
>
> I suspect that unix and its conventions would be dead by now if not for
> Linux.
>
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