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Aucb.732 fa.editor-p utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!C70:editor-people Thu Mar 18 09:18:37 1982 Trailing Newlines >From Greenberg.Symbolics@MIT-MULTICS Thu Mar 18 09:15:20 1982 On the Teleterm 1040 "MULTICS" [sic] terminal, a device particularly ill-suited for use with that operating system, is a parity-detect light which goes on when a bad character is received. The terminal wiill then wedge, and there is nothing you can do, or more significantly, ever DO do, than open the top panel, and press this "communication error reset" button, which promptly restores normalcy. Several people have suggested the light be replaced by an arm which opens up the cover and presses the button.

Beating this horse once more, TYMNET's autospeed detect lines did (probably still do) type out "PLEASE TYPE LOGIN IDENTIFIER". If you type anything but a lower-case a, from certain terminals, it says (under circumstances I will never understand) "PLEASE DIAL UP AGAIN AND TYPE a".

The point of this is that it's silly for an editor to say "please go to the end of the buffer and type newline". What could you ever possibly do except that, when it says "your buffer doesnt end in a newline?". It should do it itself. Trying to explain the rational for this behavior, let alone the execution, to computer-semi-illiterates, is undesirable. For those who are using Emacs to edit object files, etc, and MUST NOT HAVE THE TRAILING NL (of course, my remarks are ONLY relevant to systems where trailing NL's are a fetish), use a special command or mode that defines flags such that that is the case.

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