# The Great Newline Schism

**URL:** <https://discourse.codinghorror.com/t/the-great-newline-schism/123>\
**Category:** blog\
**Created:** [January 18, 2010, 12:00am UTC](https://discourse.codinghorror.com/t/the-great-newline-schism/123 "2010-01-18T00:00:00Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 17

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**Author:** ![dtobias](https://discourse-cdn.codinghorror.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v2/letter/d/d07c76/32.png) [@dtobias](https://discourse.codinghorror.com/u/dtobias)\
**Post date:** [February 18, 2010, 12:00am UTC](https://discourse.codinghorror.com/t/the-great-newline-schism/123/17 "2010-02-18T00:00:00Z")

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I’ve been burned by the newline problem many times myself; some tools  
make it easier than others to deal with it (UltraEdit, my preferred  
text editor, shows which mode a file is in and lets you convert  
easily; but you can still get confused by a file that has multiple  
ending types caused by copy-and-pasting), and if you use FTP to  
transfer files you can select “ASCII mode” to convert to the  
appropriate conventions of the destination.

Everywhere you look in computing, you find the debris of all the past  
archaic hardware and software, platform and standards wars, and so  
on, preserved out of desire for compatibility. This can be both  
fascinating and maddening. Inquire into just about anything: Why  
does Windows use backslashes for directory paths? Why do URLs use  
forward slashes? What’s the point of the double slash near the  
beginning of URLs? Why do some standards, such as for e-mail,  
specify lines of no more than 80 characters? Why is “prn” not a  
legal file/pathname in M$ operating systems and application  
frameworks? Why do most user agent identifier strings start with  
"Mozilla"? Why does Windows 7 have “6.1” as its internal version  
number? Why are reverse domain lookups done with a top level domain  
named “.arpa”? These things will always lead to long, tangled  
stories, sometimes stretching into the dim past of computing up to or  
beyond a half century ago. (I think the 80-character limits derived  
from 1890s Hollerith punch cards.)

But if that’s what we have after less than a century of the  
computerized world, imagine what sorts of historical baggage there’ll  
be in the devices of a millennium or more in the future.

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