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Aucb.730 fa.editor-p utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!C70:editor-people Thu Mar 18 08:40:37 1982 Re: CRLF in Emacs >From Margolin.PDO@MIT-MULTICS Thu Mar 18 08:38:16 1982 Multics Emacs has several option flags which control its behavior with respect to saving files not ending in a newline. There is one flag thet says to query the user, another which says to automatically add a trailing newline if necessary. The default is to have the first one off and the second one on, so that naive users (many of whom wouldn't know a trailing newline if it hit them in the head) don't get screwed by programs that require a trailing newline. The second one was asked for after the first one was around for a while, and many users didn't understand the query that they were getting when they tried to save their files.

There are other reasons for wanting trailing newlines besides card-image oriented programs: if your file doesn't end in a newline then your ready message comes out on the same line as the last line of text when you use the print command, or other programs (like a line editor) that print out your text on the terminal. Don't anybody say that these programs should be smart and print out an extra newline if the file doesn't end in one; if we were to pull that sort of stunt, we ought to just force the file to end in a newline in the first place. The contract of the print program is to reproduce the text of the file on the terminal, not to trick the user into thinking that the last character is something it isn't. Barmar

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