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From: greg@censoft.com (Greg Haerr)
Subject: [TUHS] Why is \n 012?
Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2003 19:57:31 -0800	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <040b01c2e5f0$03000580$6401a8c0@gregnewport> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20030309032000.GD34634@wantadilla.lemis.com>

> A thing that has puzzled me almost for ever is why the newline
> character in C is 012 and not 015.  Does anybody have any insight?

Well, my take on this is that C was developed with UNIX,
of course, and UNIX early on decided to use a single
character rather than a two-char (CRLF) sequence for
end-of-lines.  So, since the CR was already in use for 
the leading char in the two-char sequence, it made it a lot
easier to use the LF character for the single newline, so
programs wouldn't always have to be checking a second
character...

Regards,

Greg




  reply	other threads:[~2003-03-09  3:57 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 4+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2003-03-09  3:20 Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2003-03-09  3:57 ` Greg Haerr [this message]
2003-03-09  6:19   ` M. Warner Losh
2003-03-09  6:07 Dennis Ritchie

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