Where should the type information be 133

don't count. Traditional mainframe systems (and VMS) do, in native mode (i.e. not in their POSIX environment, if any).

Don't be silly.

In MVS, VMS etc., the maximum length of a line is a property of the file, and is usually below 254 characters. Tabs may not be in the permitted character set for text files.

If you use an escape mechanism to meet the C standard's requirements, you are immediately preventing interoperability with the system's built-in utilities and other languages. If you don't, you can't meet those requirements.

Sigh. That is what several of the supposedly conforming C run-time systems for MVS did, and was one of the reasons that I designed and part-implemented a reasonable one. And worked on the first conforming commercial one, too, incidentally.

It doesn't work, unless you play legalistic games and stop it being useful. Think of the interaction with fflush(), specifically with its use to ensure that output is written in case a program is end. In that model, the output is written to the scratch file and gets lost. There are other problems, but they are more subtle.

Regards, Nick Maclaren.