[Haskell-cafe] runInteractiveProcess and hGetLine on Windows

[Jason Dusek]

David Roundy <droundy at darcs.net> wrote:
> ...when in text mode on DOS-descended systems, the
> character sequence "\r\n" is converted to "\n" by the operating
> system.

  So basically, Windows supports both the "\n" convention and
  the "\r\n" convention by making a distinction between "text"
  and "binary" read modes. No other major operating system
  requires this distinction -- they are all *nixen -- so it
  seems reasonable to just punt on it.

  It would be too bad, though, if this resulted in a lot of
  Windows specific code getting written -- there are a lot of
  Windows users and eventually they'll unionize or something.
  People will throw together System.Win32.TextMode or something
  like that and then projects will be littered with platform
  specific code, though they needn't be.

  If we just put up a `textMode` filter, then everyone will have
  to throw that in front of their reads/writes to guard against
  corruption on Windows. We'll have verbose, silly looking code.

  If, on the other hand, we just give in to Windows, then some
  things are good and some are bad. First of all, if hGetLine
  has Windows behaviour on Windows and Unix behaviour on Unix,
  then any data files shipped with Cabal packages will likely
  need to be newline transformed. That is annoying. On the other
  hand, the semantics of 'getting a line' will be maintained
  across platforms, and the Windows users will be pacified (for
  a time). We all know what appeasement got the British...

-- 
_jsn