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Date:	Tue, 1 Dec 1992 00:08:21 -0500
From:	byron@netapp.com (Byron Rakitzis)
Message-Id: <9212010508.AA15071@netapp.netapp.com>
To:	alan@oldp.astro.wisc.edu, sam-fans@hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu
Subject: Re:  Lines and last lines.

>My first comment is that [2] is somewhat against sam's philosophy that
>files are arbitrary byte streams; it does impose a structure on the
>file (i.e., that the final character must be \n).

Unfortunately, sam's philosophy is most emphatically not that files are
arbitrary byte streams. e.g.:

; sam -d
B /bin/ls
 -. /bin/ls
?warning: null characters elided

and this is an improvement(!) on the previous situation (pre-unicode?),
which was that any "non-ascii" characters got elided. I'm not sure if
that meant nul+any-characters-with-the-8th-bit-set or what.

Anyway, in case you haven't noticed, I think this is one of sam's more
serious design flaws. It's one of the few reasons why I still want
emacs available on the Unix machines I use. (other reasons: gdb support
and glass tty support, i.e., the Poor Man's Window System.)