3.9 Oddities

Klaus D. Witzel klaus.witzel at cobss.com
Tue Sep 5 13:22:44 UTC 2006


On Tue, 05 Sep 2006 11:42:04 +0200, Rich Warren wrote:
...
> Here's my point.

I do understand your point. But please don't take the following as an  
offense.

> As a cross-platform editor, Squeak must be able to handle these  
> transparently.

Squeak is not the editor (Java is not the editor. Algol is (was :) not the  
editor). Mind to talk about the tools you critisize. Not every tool is  
newLine sensitive...

> Either it needs to automatically normalize everything to a single  
> Squeak-standard newline, or it needs to accept both of these (and  
> others, old Mac os used a third newline variant, and there may be some  
> I'm not familiar with) in a reasonable and transparent way.
>
> I should be able to open any ascii text file (regardless of which OS it  
> was written on) and it should appear as it was intended--regardless of  
> the particular newline encoding.

Yes, almost everybody complains, see for example

- http://www.google.com/search?q=newline+confusion

I do not believe that there is a simple solution (because then all these  
complaints would disappear immediately). I believe that a COMPUTER cannot  
"know" what I want do do (or not to do) with newLines. Perhaps I want to  
write newLine-compliant text on platform A for use on platform B, who  
knows.

> Displaying the box glyphs is possibly good in some cases (for example,  
> non-ascii codes that may inadvertently get copied from pdfs). A better  
> solution would be to strip out any invalid characters automatically.  
> After all, if they're invalid, they can't be doing anything constructive.

The parser could do that when accepting source code, for sure. But please  
do not do anything automagically when I just review source code. I would  
like to see *all* *bugs* *in* *their* *original* *form*.

> But displaying the box glyphs for standard ASCII DOS/WIN newlines feels  
> like a big step backwards.

AFAIK there are not so many in the 3.9 Squeak .sources and .changes files  
(examples are classes VersionNumber and VersionHistory).

/Klaus

> -Rich-
>





More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list