CompuServe Thread

The use of 0Ah to terminate character strings is a UNIX convention. "The UNIX system is unusual in its approach to representing control information, particularly its use of newlines to terminate lines. Many systems instead provide 'records', one per line, each of which contains not only your data but also a count of the number of characters in the line (and no newline) [eg Pascal – RW]. Other systems terminate each line with a carriage return _and_ a newline, because that sequence is necessary for output on most terminals. (The word 'linefeed' is a synonym for newline, so this sequence is often called 'CRLF', which is nearly pronounceable.) "The UNIX system does neither – there are no records, no record counts, and no bytes in any file that you or your programs did not put there. A newline is expanded into a carriage return and a newline when sent to a terminal, but programs need only deal with the single newline character, because that is all they see. For most purposes, this simple scheme is exactly what is wanted. When a more complicated structure is needed, it can easily be built on top of this; the converse, creating simplicity from complexity, is harder to achieve." – "The UNIX Programming Environment", B. W. Kernighan & R. Pike C? Enter command, N for next message or <CR> for menu : n