From: tomas DOT fasth AT twinspot DOT net (Tomas Fasth) Subject: Re: Why text=binary mounts 11 Jan 1998 17:47:41 -0800 Message-ID: <34B8FA4A.96D3075B.cygnus.gnu-win32@twinspot.net> References: <01BD1D0C DOT 8604DA80 DOT tiberius AT braemarinc DOT com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit To: "gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com" Cc: "Gary R. Van Sickle" Gary R. Van Sickle wrote: > I don't want to start yet another religious war, but the 'get a real OS' > refrain sounds a lot like the same refrain we used to hear from the Mac > users. And the Apple II users. And the C64 users. And the Amiga users. Gary, I admit 'get a real OS' seldom is a meaningful argument. I just couldn't refrain myself from using it. One of my weak spots I guess :) > Microsoft is winning (in fact has already won) because people hear > 'get a real OS' and immediately turn off. What's all this talk about win and loose? I say, the real winner in the long run is the Internet community. Windows will pass, the Internet will remain. (My very own prediction ;-) Microsoft Windows dominates as a desktop platform. This does not necessarily mean that it's a preferred platform in general for program development. Note that I said 'preferred'. A great majority of the programmers today have to make their living developing for MS Windows. But that does not mean that all these programmers are putting their vote on it as the preferred environment for program development. As an example, the steady growth of installed Linux and FreeBSD systems says otherwise. There is already many fine tools available for MS Windows that tries to overcome some of the design flaws in that OS. The point is; don't blame Unix for making it difficult to port Unix tools to such OS'es. Unix is simply a great platform for program development. I guess that's why so many great tools for program development comes from Unix. And that's why this issue is an issue. Programmers stuck with the poorer DOS environment have recognized that the grass is greener on the Unix side. They want greener grass too! Give us those tools now, they say. But wait, why are those tools so stupid when applied on our precious DOS text files? Fix it, they say. Your frustration about textual end-of-line differencies can easily be morphed into a stunning fascination of the fact that the designers of three major OS each choosed three different combinations out of four possible when picking a representation of end-of-line character sequence. I'm talking about Mac ('\r'), Unix ('\n') and DOS ('\r\n'), where the Mac choice is by far most hostile to the programmer community, since it seem to have been made most recently. I haven't heard yet of an OS using ('\n\r'), but it sure is a valid sequence so I wouldn't be surprised if it has been used somewhere. I think a reason for why 'get a REAL OS' turns people off is because people in general don't give a damn whether programmers are in heaven or hell when trying to do their job. Also, companies developing propriatary costware never have cared much about portability. Hell, they even actively oppose portability, compatibility and interoperability as a marketing tool for competitor oppression. At least in the past. The big success of the Internet hopefully have forced those companies to rethink. > Furthermore if UNIX is a 'real' OS, why can't the UNIX tools accomodate > more than one text file format, including my 'poor DOS text files'? Because Unix also means Simple (note that I didn't say easy :-). And a Unix end-of-line is simply just a single character. And because of the same reason many DOS programs can't understand Unix end-of-lines, why should Unix programmers have cared about DOS perculiarities? You can't think of everything, can you? ;-) > What did I miss here? GnuWin32 does not include any sort of text proces > sing library as far as I know. It deals with the problem by putting in a > layer *between* the fopen stuff and the OS calls AFAIK, when the solution I > think you are proposing is a layer *over* the fopen stuff. Oh, I think I ment 'back to gnuwin32, which this list is about', or something. Anyway, a possible one-for-all solution, at least for future developments, could be a text processing layer over stdio. Too bad this would not help much when porting existing software, would it? > I am in no way thinking of breaking the 'UNIX way of computing'! I just > don't see why a compiler/make util/etc. shouldn't be able to take any text > file you throw at it, regardless of which operating system it is running > on. You have a point there. But wishes does not solve problems. Someone has to come up with a liable solution. Changing stdio behavior is not a liable solution IMHO. We need more like a holy grail of porting text processing tool. > No surprise here. But please tell me why the UNIX way is the right way. Note that I didn't really said that. But Unix sure has some qualities that DOS don't have. One may have an opinion that Unix desktops sucks. And that's probably what really is missing in Unix, a standard state-of-the-art graphical desktop. But desktops are not about OS functionality, it's about application services, which preferably should be layered on top of OS services, as X-Windows have proved to work. Microsoft evidently have very skillful user interface engineers. What they have done on top of DOS can also be done on top of Unix. A good example of such an efford is the K desktop environment. Looks very promising indeed. > And while we're at it, is JPG the right way, or is PNG the right way? To > people, text is text. Why should it not be the same for a 300MHz Pentium > II. Or your SparcStation. Or the Mac. Be real. If text is text, then why can't images just be images? You are comparing different end-of-line schemes with different formats of image encoding. I'm sure you can find imaging tools on DOS, Mac and Unix that do not support each other's formats of encoding. Never the less, I think most programmers share your frustration. > I propose that I will write a 'text access library' with the following > features: An honorable proposal indeed. I say; have peace in your mind Gary and go ahead! I for one surely will make use of such a promising set of tools. You can bet it will be appreciated in the programming community. Are you sure such a library not already exist somewhere out there? I could be worth looking before you begin ... -- Tomas Fasth mailto:tomas DOT fasth AT euronetics DOT com EuroNetics Operation http://euronetics.com Mjärdevi Science Park Office tel: +46 13 218 181 Teknikringen 1 E Office fax: +46 13 218 182 58330 Linköping Mobile tel: +46 708 870 957 Sweden Mobile fax: +46 708 870 258 - For help on using this list (especially unsubscribing), send a message to "gnu-win32-request AT cygnus DOT com" with one line of text: "help".