Message-ID: <3401CC3F.3C1A@cs.com> Date: Mon, 25 Aug 1997 18:17:35 +0000 From: "John M. Aldrich" Reply-To: fighteer AT cs DOT com Organization: Two pounds of chaos and a pinch of salt MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Cesar Scarpini Rabak CC: djgpp AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: Writing a struct to disk References: <1 DOT 5 DOT 4 DOT 32 DOT 19970825173441 DOT 006ab780 AT dce03 DOT ipt DOT br> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Precedence: bulk Cesar Scarpini Rabak wrote: > > Text format is not _that_ highly portable! When one switches from > environment the way the end of line is marked varies, and filters or > converting programms may be needed... True. However, a great many programs that I have seen are capable of recognizing EOLs, whatever their format. For example, DOS Edit can load and parse Unix-formatted text files. I guess they're just designed with that in mind. > And since C language does not require a standard character set (as e.g. Ada > which requires ASCII), one may even to use translators for the character set > as well! C may not require one, but characters 32-127 of the ASCII character set are pretty well fixed on most systems. I suppose that machines using that IBM format, EDB-whatsit, could cause confusion, but anybody who uses such systems should be aware of the discrepancy. But your concerns are valid, which brings up another point: is there such a thing as a universal format for data exchange? GNU seems to think so; at least, all of their files are in text format and they have very few problems. -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- | John M. Aldrich | "Democracy is based on the assumption| | aka Fighteer I | that a million men are wiser than one| | mailto:fighteer AT cs DOT com | man. How's that again? I missed | | http://www.cs.com/fighteer | something." - Lazarus Long | ---------------------------------------------------------------------