CRLF is obsolete and should be abolished

Counterpoint: Unix deciding on a non-standard line ending was always a mistake. It has produced decades of random incompatibility for no particular benefit. CRLF isn’t a convention: it’s two different pieces of the base terminal API. You have no idea how many programs rely on CR and LF working correctly.

Yeah. It's weird how Unix picked LF given its love of terminals. CRLF is the semantically correct line ending considering terminal semantics. It's present in the terminal subsystem to this day, people just don't notice because they have OPOST output post processing enabled which automatically converts LF into CRLF.

It is a standard line ending. ANSI X3.4-1968 says:

10 LF (Line Feed). A format effector that advances the active position to the same character position on the next line. (Also applicable to display devices.) Where appropriate, this character may have the meaning “New Line” (NL), a format effector that advances the active position to the first character position on the next line. Use of the NL convention requires agreement between sender and recipient of data.

ASCII 1968 - https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc20

ASCII 1977 - https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/FIPS/fipspub1-2-197...

I have always felt that somehow Linux and proponents of it default to every decision it made being right and everything else, namely Windows, being wrong. I honestly feel Linux is orders of magnitude more complex. It is much easier, in my experience to make software just work on Windows. (This is not to say Windows doesn't have bad decisions. It has many. All the major OSs are terrible.)

The first sentence is exactly what LF is in CRLF, and implies the necessity of CR. CR returns the cursor to the first character of the active line, LF moves it one line down without changing the horizontal position.

The second sentence is the UNIX interpretation of LF doing the equivalent of CRLF. But calling it a standard line ending when it's an alternative meaning defined in the standard as "requires agreement between sender and recipient of data" is a bit of a stretch. It's permissible by the standard, but it's not the default as per the standard

But, like the article says, LF is not useful. I could always interpret LF as NL and if you send CRs too it won't break anything. If you know I'm interpreting LF that way you can just stop sending the CRs. That's what happened in Unix.

Counter-counterpoint: using 2 bytes to signal one relevant operation creates ambiguity out of thin air. If all you care about is "where does the line end?", having CRLF as a line ending creates edge cases for "there is only CR" and "there is only LF". Are those line endings or not? How do you deal with them? And what's LFCR?

Personally speaking, I've always written my parsers to be permissive and accept either CR¹, LF, or CRLF as line endings. And it always meant keeping a little extra boolean for "previous byte was CR" to ignore the LF to not turn CRLF into 2 line endings.

¹ CR-only was used on some ancient (m68k era?) Macintosh computers I believe.

P.S.: LFCR is 2 line endings in my parsers :D

I'd argue (but have no historical context) that it's a distinction between storage format and presentation interface, and IMHO that makes a lot of sense. A terminal has other operations too, backspaces and deletes being the most basic. Which coincidentally are one hell of a mess across different terminal types between ^H / 0x08 and DEL / 0x7f as well…

(And these distinctions predate UNIX — if I were confronted with an inconsistent mess I'd go for simplicity too, and a 2-byte newline is definitely not simple just by merit of being 2 bytes. I personally wouldn't have cared whether it was CR or LF, but would have cared to make it a single byte.)

Didn’t some version of an Apple operating system have CR as a line ending?