From: Julian Snitow <vangczung@...>
Date: 2003-04-01T00:15:48+09:00
Subject: Re: Hard coded newline characters

David King Landrith wrote:
> On Sunday, March 30, 2003, at 08:06 PM, nobu.nokada@softhome.net wrote:
> 
>>> 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.)
>>
>>
>> Interesting but I doubt its necessarity and worthfulness.
> 
> 
> Likewise with your reply.
>

Ouch.
I'm sure antagonizing people will *really* make them want to help you...

> 
> I am going to be gradually introducing ncurses based terminal 
> capabilities to series of large and quite complex programs that are 
> entirely readline/puts/printf based, and re-writing the UI layer all at 
> once from the top isn't a viable alternative.  Thus, the change will be 
> gradual, and the initial inclusion of ncurses must not require 
> modification of the existing code.
> 

And what is so hard about having a stub file that contains

begin
   load 'real-main-program-file.rb'
rescue
   # ...
ensure
   endwin
end


If that doesn't work, you could continue insulting people until they 
spontaneously decide to change their code just for you... (most likely 
by using \n wherever possible) :P