On Thu, 15 Feb 2001, Hans Aberg wrote: > > Compaq OpenVMS and IBM OS/MVS are two examples > > Are these OS's in continued widespread use, or are they dying? -- The thing > is that without those OS line separator convetions, one can decide that a > line separator should be \l, \r, or a \r\l (as in Java), and that would be > platform independent. That's totally irrelevant. You are confusing OS level and library level. What you see in Java is at the library level and has near to nothing to do with the underlying operating system. To take OpenVMS, it has various OS level file formats (both stream and record oriented), many of which can be used for textual data. In every case you can read characters or lines or whatever if your language library offers the functionality. In Java you see \r\l, in C \n. Platform independence is today implemented at the library level, not the OS level. This was quite different twenty years ago, when OS capabilities influenced library (and sometimes language) design. TeX the program was influenced by what Pascal (and particular compilers) could do. That's the reason for the implementation in TeX the Pascal program. If you rip it apart anyway, you can redo that bit with or without changing the way the program behaves. And still, it has nothing to do with input encoding or internal representation. So, let's not get sidetracked. Rainer Schöpf