Re: Castle Adventure by David Malmberg

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <8c160850.0407131129.777c6af6@posting.google.com>,
Ben Yates <anoneds@netscape.net> wrote:
>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.

A lot of BASIC interpreters used that method when storing the
program text in tokenized form.

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


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