On Sep 6, 2006, at 11:26 PM, David T. Lewis wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 06, 2006 at 09:09:27PM -1000, Rich Warren wrote:
>
> Many people, myself included, prefer not to have Squeak do the  
> automatic
> line end conversion. But it's largely a matter of personal preference,
> so give CrLfFileStream a try if you prefer that approach.

This is what I'm struggling to understand. What possible benefit is  
there in not converting line ends? Can you give me an example where  
converting the line ends would cause a problem?

Here's my view. Back in the dark ages, moving text files from one  
system to another was a nightmare. There are a number of small unix  
apps to deal with this very issue. Now, however, transferring text  
files has become transparent. Modern text editors just deal with the  
details. If they can handle multibyte strings and various common  
newline characters (or character combinations) all at the same time,  
why can't we?

And one more question (ok, series of related questions), if everyone  
else is completely set against changing the way Squeak handles  
newlines, what are we going to do with all the existing code that is  
littered with these ugly glyphs? Surely we're not going to just leave  
them the way they are?

How are we going to handle viewing and editing text documents-- 
particularly text documents that come from Windows systems? Is there  
a benefit to displaying the text in a way other than what the author  
intended? Or are we going to force people to deal with these  
documents outside the Squeak environment?

What happens if I want to convert an existing web site to seaside? Am  
I going to be forced to convert all my html documents before I can  
copy the parts I want and paste them into my seaside application?

I agree that we should leave alone any strange characters that have  
potentially ambiguous meanings. Displaying them as a default glyph  
seems reasonable. But, as far as I can tell, the common end of line  
encodings do not fall into this category.

I'm sorry if I came across too strong earlier. However, this whole  
issue just seems ridiculous to me. If there's a good reason for it,  
fine. I'd love to hear it. But, if we're creating problems in a large  
number of cases just to solve a few odd corner cases (or worse yet,  
creating problems with no benefit whatsoever), then I think its a bad  
trade.

-Rich-