BC changing LF to CR+LF when copying files

[Dave_L]

Sorry to necro an old thread, but I was just curious why the currency symbol ¤ (scarab) was chosen for Windows line endings.

My guess: it looks like a window.

[Zoë]

We originally added line terminators to the visible whitespace option in BC2, circa 2000. We were still a Win32 ANSI app targeting Win9x at that point. The text compare had limited Unicode functionality, but Delphi didn't fully support the Win32 Unicode APIs and user interface controls until much later. We were also drawing the symbols using the same text output routines as everything else, and the GDI APIs didn't do font substitution yet. The original values we chose were:

Space: TILDE (U+007E)
Tab: 'RIGHT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK' (U+00BB)
Line Feed: 'PILCROW SIGN' (U+00B6)
Carriage Return: 'LEFT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK' (U+00AB)
Carriage Return/Line Feed: 'CURRENCY SIGN' (U+00A4)

Back then the limiting factors would have been whether symbols existed in the common system fonts and ideally whether they existed in the Windows system ANSI codepages (e.g., Windows-1252 on English Windows). We may have referenced other text editors of the era, but past that it would have just come down to "This is one of the small handful of codepoints we can use that aren't common in source code". BC2 had hidden tweaks settings to allow changing the symbols for international users that needed something different. I originally considered using 'MIDDLE DOT' (U+00B7) for spaces, and I think that got changed due to a lack of font support.

If/when we revisit it, we'll likely switch to ␊ 'SYMBOL FOR LINE FEED' (U+240A) and ␍ 'SYMBOL FOR CARRIAGE RETURN' (U+240D). Last time I looked, which was admittedly a quite while ago, there were still cases where we couldn't rely on support for them, but I'm sure that's much less of a concern now. We also just haven't gotten much comment on them in a long time, so it's not something that's bubbled up as needing changes.

[mryan]

Thanks for the wonderfully detailed response!