Windows predates OS/2 (OS/2 development started in 1985 according to Wikipedia)
How is it a poor engineering decision?
What about the original Mac OS using colon as a path separator? Or Lisa OS using the hyphen as a path separator?
see https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/17069/why...
Since you never know if it's a backslash or an actual Yen sign. Total fun.
The separate halfwidth yen sign does not exist in Shift-JIS at all. So any time a non-unicode Japanese Win32 application needs to draw a halfwidth yen sign, it must draw a backslash. And you can't make the official character mapping convert Backslash 0x5C into Yen sign 0xA5, otherwise all file paths would break.
That's hardly uncommon! Examine the history of basically anything.
It isn’t a poor engineering decision, that guy just didn’t read the decision criteria.
Also, according to spec, CRLF is the proper sequence for a newline, and both Unix and MacOS chose incorrectly.
CRLF existed originally because of mechanical typerwriters required two separate actions - Carriage Return (move the carriage back to the start of the line), Line Feed (advance the page to the next line).
CR is a waste for computing... it literally does nothing beneficial.
Someone should figure out the climate impact of decades of wasted processing of CR characters... that might motivate people to fix this as well.
LF vs CRLF is a single molecule of water compared to the seven seas of waste created by Electron apps or even just JavaScript itself. Todays developers are lazy as FUCK and there is no pressure for them to stop being lazy.
See: https://tonsky.me/blog/js-bloat/
> CR is a waste for computing... it literally does nothing beneficial.
When “LF” means “line feed and carriage return” both, as it does thanks to UNIX, yes. On teletype machines “line feed” meant “line feed” and “carriage return” meant “carriage return”. You need both.
Today we use an LF which means both “CR” and “LF” and we act like CR is the problem, when it was us choosing a single byte to mean two separate things joined together.
Even as a kid in school in typing class, I used a typewriter with a parallel port (probably serial, really, because you could use the keyboard without putting text on paper), and it could be used to print text sent to it. CR and LF had very different meanings on that typewriter. I wish I remembered what make and model it was…
CR enables to update a line of text. Print some text without newline at the end, print CR, print another line, and the old text will be overwritten with the new one.
Some command-line apps are using the trick to print progress bars, progress percentage, or similar. This is very beneficial.
printf( "\rsomething " ) is much easier.
RFC3676, RFC2045, among others. CRLF is the Internet standard newline