From: Bill Kelly <billk@...>
Date: 2004-06-11T02:30:58+09:00
Subject: Re: strip DOS ^Ms?

From: "Kaspar Schiess" <eule@space.ch>
> 
> | I generally strip DOS idiocy on the command line with:
> |
> |    tr -d '\r' < in > out
> 
> Why would a thing grown from history be called idiocy in any context ?
> It just is that way.

If MS-DOS had come out in the 1950's it might be forgivable.

In 1981 elegant solutions to DOS' stupidities had existed
for at least a decade...  And yet DOS debuts with:

 - lack of shell globbing (STILL doesn't)
 - shell can't escape its own metacharacters (STILL can't)
 - ^Z character terminating text files even though this
   was a historical artifact from an OS that needed them
   because its filesize was measured in blocks... POINTLESS
   when your OS knows the exact file size in bytes, which MS-DOS
   always has
 - ignorance of "a file is a bag of bytes, and everything is
   a file" metaphor
 - TWO end of line characters for text files when one would do
   (in 1981 we had CRT screens not teletypes) <grin>
 - special illegal filenames "nul" "com1" "lpt1" etc.
 - no piping of program output/input streams (they finally
   grafted this on haphazardly)
 - can't unlink an open file and continue to read from it
   (this is why ruby -i doesn't work for in-place edits in DOS)

It's "idiocy" because better solutions already existed for 
a decade...  Yes I've been using MS-DOS since 1981... :(

The history of MS-DOS is the very embodiment and manifestation
of the cute turn of phrase,

Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
-- Henry Spencer

..Sadness.

> If we change that, we would to have agree on one
> line ending for everyone. Doesn't Mac have the same issues but the other
> way round ?

At least the old macs just used a single character for 
newline, even if it was CR instead of LF... :)


Regards,

BILLKE~1.TXT