Re: Castle Adventure by David Malmberg

[anoneds@netscape.net (Ben Yates)]

pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter) wrote in message news:<cd06mv$20mu$1@merope.saaf.se>...
<snip>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> The reason for these different conventions of representing an
> end-of-line is that the ASCII character set lacks a representation
> for "end-of-line".  The closest it gets are the ASCII control
> characters "Carriage Return" (0D) and "Line Feed" (0A).  And to
> start a new line on a printer which is controlled by the ASCII
> control characters, you must send to the printer a 0D followed
> by a 0A (or the other way around).  If you just send 0D's to the
> printer, all lines will overwrite one another, and if you just
> send 0A's then the next line will start immediately below the END
> of the previous line.
> 
> 
> Old mainframe computers often used a different way to represent
> end-of-lines: there were no end-of-line characters at all in the
> text, instead end-of-lines were implicitly assumed at regular
> intervals, usually every 80'th character.  Lines shorter than 80
> characters were padded with spaces, and lines longer than 80
> characters either were truncated or wrapped onto the next line.

And other computers used line-length indicators. OpenVMS (and
strangely, the TI-99/4A) had record length attributes in front of
variable-length records to determine the record length.

Fixed records, of course, were padded to the proper length.