It's no more odd than just 'LF'. At the end of the day, something has to represent 'end of line'. The outlier here is really MS DOS, wasting a perfectly good byte on pretend-lineprinter codes.
Ahh, you're correct. I wasn't sure if CRLF was actually codified in rfc158, I just did a search for "CRLF" on it, I didn't realise they were using the hex values of CR and LF (X'0D' X'0A').
The internet is now 8 or 9 million devices big, and CRLF is still the standard newline for internet protocols.
MS-DOS isn’t alone in that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline#Representations_in_dif... claims ”Atari TOS, Microsoft Windows, DOS (MS-DOS, PC DOS, etc.), DEC TOPS-10, RT-11, CP/M, MP/M, OS/2, Symbian OS, Palm OS, Amstrad CPC, and most other early non-Unix and non-IBM operating systems” used it.
The real surprise is the BBC Micro, which used LF+CR.
If I had to guess I'd say CP/M was developed for extra dumb teletypes that needed both to properly handle a newline. So many quirks in terminals date back to the days when everybody was just making it up as they went along. Legacy support is the root of most braindamage.
”The separation of newline into two functions concealed the fact that the print head could not return from the far right to the beginning of the next line in one-character time. That is why the sequence was always sent with the CR first. A character printed after a CR would often print as a smudge, on-the-fly in the middle of the page, while it was still moving the carriage back to the first position.”
There's an entry point in the BBC Micro's OS that's routine that prints a character, or LF+CR if the character is CR (13). This routine prints the CR second, so that when it was called with 13 originally it can fall through into the main, non-translating character print routine with 13 in the accumulator, and then return to the caller that way too. (These two routines promise to preserve the accumulator.) Saves a couple of bytes in the ROM.
(There's also an entry point partway through the wrapper that just prints a newline. DRY and all that.)
The code is not exactly this, but differs from it in no relevant way:
A lone CR is certainly more odd than a LF...LF is implicitly a new line. CR by definition is a return to the beginning of the line; literally NOT the end of the line!
Who would choose 'beginning of line' to mean 'end of line'?? Oh, Apple :)
There's nothing more 'implicitly new line' about either, in a text file. But if you're particularly set on hardware analogies - there's a 'return' key on keyboards and no 'line feed' one.
Umm, there absolutely is, unless you want to start using the backspace character instead of line feed or any other arbitrary swap, or maybe 'null', or 'delete'; Sure, 'null' should mean new line... 'Line Feed' by words, use and history, means new line....it feeds lines...i don't understand how you could make such an argument.
The fact that some keyboards say 'return' (but usually have a down-and-to-the-left graphic) is a separate issue, now that we are talking actual hardware; The lack of need for a specific CR, LF keys is obvious. Once again, of course today apple is using the odd choice of 'return', despite the rest of the industry. Many (most?) of 70s onward keyboards had an 'enter' key, no?
You're pulling things out of your ass. I'm interested in comments like yours. At some point between reading the previous comment and responding to it, you must have had some thought that goes, roughly, "Hey, I'm just going to make some shit up now and post it." Right? How else does it happen?
Apple's is not the only ecosystem that settled on carriage return. Who do you think was around for them to deliberately break compatibility with in 1977? Kildall?
At that time Apple chose CR, UNIX was just one of a multitude of minicomputer operating systems. Compatibility with it would have been only important in hindsight.
I wonder if this would have been a big concern for home computer vendors at the time. How many of them would have used Unix? Even if they had, would Unix even have been popular enough to really matter?
