From: David King Landrith <dave@...>
Date: 2003-03-31T06:39:01+09:00
Subject: Hard coded newline characters

There are a surprising number of ruby source files that have newline 
(\n) characters hardcoded as the line terminator--it appears that way 
more than half of the files do.  Shouldn't these be set to a macro that 
outputs $\ (or perhaps $,) character.  It seems to me that the most of 
the places where ruby programs write directly to stdout are not places 
where speed is of the essense (e.g., printing stack traces.)

Given that this is the case, it appears that setting $\ to '\r\n' 
doesn't changed the output of routines that utilize a c puts, fputs, 
printf, or printf variant to write text to stdout.  Specifically, I'd 
like to control the printout of exception backtraces by changing $\.  
I'd like to do this because I am using ncurses, and the backtraces of 
exceptions do not print correctly in ncurses windows (or pads); '\r\s' 
is needed to do this in ncurses, since '\n' simply causes the lines to 
step down across the screen as follows

/libtest.rb:100:in `puts': Interrupt
                                         from test.rb:11
                                                         from 
test.rb:10:in `times'

As a work around, I've dabbled a bit with doing traps in order to issue 
an endwin before the exception gets printed, but I have not found good 
documentation on how to do to traps, and it appears impossible to raise 
or throw an exception within a trap proc block.  Any quick workaround 
that anyone could provide would be appreciated.

-------------------------------------------------------
David King Landrith
   (w) 617.227.4469x213
   (h) 617.696.7133

One useless man is a disgrace, two
are called a law firm, and three or more
become a congress   -- John Adams
-------------------------------------------------------
public key available upon request