Re: [lmi] [lmi-commits] master df58835 2/6: Never write files in "text" mode: always use "binary" instead

[Greg Chicares]

On 2016-12-05 12:54, Vadim Zeitlin wrote:
> On Mon,  5 Dec 2016 06:55:44 +0000 (UTC) Greg Chicares <address@hidden> wrote:
[...]
> GC>     Never write files in "text" mode: always use "binary" instead
> GC>     
> GC>     Otherwise, files written with msw can't be used with *nix.
[...]
>  Wouldn't it be better to make our code accept and ignore "\r" before "\n"
> even under Unix?

There exists no fopen() mode that makes *nix programs ignore '\r',
so this would require extra code to be written everywhere a file is
opened. OTOH, specifying binary mode everywhere is easy--it's just
a standard argument to any file-open function, and no extra, custom
logic is needed.

And of course ftell() and fseek() can't be used with '\r\n'-delimited
files.

> While most MSW programs handle Unix EOLs correctly
> nowadays, some of them still don't

Even 'wordpad' does; 'notepad' is the only one I know that doesn't.

> so it seems user-unfriendly to generate
> the files that will mostly (almost exclusively, even) used under MSW in
> Unix format.

This particular commit affects rate-table text files, which are
intended for use by developers only; only the inscrutable binary
format will be distributed to end users.

For decades lmi has used '\n'-delimited files only. I'm convinced
that this was and remains the best policy--now more than ever,
because I'm developing on *nix only these days. And even more so
in the future, because lmi is likely to outlive msw and it will
always run well on *nix.