[Info-vax] CRTL and RMS vs SSIO

[Lawrence D’Oliveiro]

On Thursday, October 7, 2021 at 2:18:57 AM UTC+13, osuv... at gmail.com wrote:

> Open source software ports often comes with the restriction that it only works 
> with stream-LF files.

I would say that’s partially true. Typically there are options to treat files as “text” or “binary”. A “binary” file is just a stream of arbitrary 8-bit bytes, which are supposed to be read or written without any imposition of record boundaries, sector-size rounding or special treatment of any byte values. A “text” file is assumed to be broken up into lines. It is true that LF is the traditional Unix line delimiter. But enlightened toolkits like Python are capable of reading text files in “universal newline” mode, so for example if you copy a text file created on MS-DOS (line delimiter = CR+LF, because CP/M did it that way, for no rational reason) in binary mode onto a Linux system, your Python text-processing script running on the latter can cope with it without a hiccup.