On Sat, 26 May 2001 Fleeberz at aol.com wrote:

> [semi-OT, attempted humor]
> In a message dated 2001-05-26 8:21:33 AM, lewis at mail.msen.com writes:
>
> >On Thu, May 24, 2001 at 11:32:07PM +0100, John Hinsley wrote:
> >>
> >> I just wonder if you could use Squeak shell to pipe stuff through a bash
> >> script....
> >
> >Yes. Well, sort of. There is a bit of an impedence mismatch between
> >Squeak objects and the streams of characters which a bash script
> >expects to see on its input.
>
> Thus the importance of a proper line terminator. Used to have this problem
> with AppleTalk before I switched to ethernet...

I think that there is two things being confused here:

First, squeak has a 'binary' format for changesets and projects. This
format is supposed to be portable between all of squeaks platforms. The
fact that this format is ASCII text with Mac line-ending conventions
doesn't change the fact that it is intended to be a binary output.

Second, squeak should have the ability to export a seperate, different
non-portable, platform-dependent format for storing this text, which uses
platform line-ending conventions. There may also be an import operation
which can either read the platform-dependent format, or can attempt to be
intelligent and guess line-endings. (and thus can read files exported by
squeak on other platforms).

The two are semantically different, and I think that some of the confusion
is caused by not distinguishing between their purposes.

We should not convince squeak to use LF or CR as a line seperator. What it
uses for its internal platform-independent format should be irrelevant.
(IMO, maybe it would be easier to solve this confusion by having squeak
gzip this data, to emphasize that it is not intended to be modified or
viewed as-is.)


Scott



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