what's the difference between LFLine Fee and NL New line 4446

Paul Gilmartin

As the first C compiler was written in order to facilitate the implementation of UNIX, the two are intimately related.

There's nothing wrong with C doing that. The *operating system* takes care of handling the requirements of the various printing terminals, display terminals, and line printers attached to the computer. So if the convention is that a user program sends a line feed character to the operating system to start printing on a new line, that is perfectly well.

In the world I'm familiar with, to print text, you might call a routine that uses the convention that the first character of the string you are transmitting to be printed indicates where the text shall be put - perhaps at the top of a new page, perhaps at the beginning of a new line, perhaps overprinted on top of the last text printed.

You might have the *option* of buttigning a logical input-output unit (I think you call them "file handles") to a device in 'binary' mode, in which case your program could actually transmit control characters and expect them to do something. In that mode, of course, it is helpful to read the manual for the device, and the operating system shall not add line feeds after your carriage returns for you. This mode is very helpful, for example, if you would like to draw pictures on the screen of a Tektronix 4010 terminal.

But for the ordinary computer user, there *are* no control characters. Those are for telecommunications engineers to worry about. A disk file is made up of a bunch of Pascal strings, not C strings, and so you can mix binary data with text data in files without the slightest fear that one might tamper with record boundaries thereby.

I can't, for the life of me, think of a good reason for the makers of CP-M, MS-DOS which came after it, the Commodore-64, the Apple Macintosh, and so many other microcomputers, to follow the lead of UNIX in this regard - even if they did use CR or CRLF to delimit records instead of LF -instead of following the practice on a *real* computer... i.e., an IBM mainframe.

Of course, it may have helped that most people who *used* IBM mainframes had to struggle with JCL. If only the Michigan Terminal System had been more popular... then people would have seen what a computer is supposed to be like, and they would have gotten it right!

John Savard