Re: mode line eol char indication

[David De La Harpe Golden]

Juanma Barranquero wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 1, 2009 at 19:11, Drew Adams <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> > So you are arguing that it is the system/platform name that is more meaningful
> > to users, not the eol characters. I'm OK with that.
>
> I'm not. \n, \r and \r\n (or ^J, etc) are exact: what they say is what
> the file contains. "Unix", "DOS" and "Mac" are just hints about the
> likely origin. Is not like it is impossible to create CRLF files under
> GNU/Linux, or LF files on Windows.

I agree with Juanma on the exactness issue.  Emacs is still first and 
foremost a text editor, line endings are a pretty unavoidable aspect of 
editing text files. And LF-ending files are not particularly
uncommon on windows in my experience (which mostly involves windows
boxes being used as little more than access terminals for less sucky 
computers, mind).

I kinda dislike \n since in C \n doesn't mean LF in general since it's 
defined to translate to whatever the native newline sequence is in files 
opened in text mode IIRC.

CR/LF/CRLF are nicely descriptive, though CRLF is a bit long.
CR/LF/CL are all the same length, and there is no ASCII nonprinting 
character called CL AFAIK.

^M/^J/^M^J are similarly descriptive, and have the possible advantage 
that one can directly concatenate them to other things and they will 
still stand out somewhat, like /\: do, thanks to the caret.

BTW,  Unicode specs printable representations for ascii control 
characters - see U+240A and U+240D.  On unicode text terminals and 
graphical displays, might be nice to just use them?

http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2400.pdf

␍/␊/␍␊

Possible disadvantage being that not all fonts might include them I 
guess, and some might supply peculiar glyphs for them (on my system
they're just quite nice little mini cr and lf signs, shrug).