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I'll plead ignorance of mainframe OS historical idiosyncrasies. (but observe IBM's aggressively making progress on hosting linux on 390's) > From: "Bradd W. Szonye" <bradd+srfi@xxxxxxxxxx> > Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2004 19:04:01 -0800 > To: srfi-52@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > Subject: Re: Encodings. > Resent-From: srfi-52@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > Resent-Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2004 04:04:11 +0100 (NFT) > > On Fri, Feb 13, 2004 at 09:19:21PM -0500, Paul Schlie wrote: >> From the best I can tell, there is no difference between opening a >> file using C's fopen function in binary mode or text mode, with the >> exception Of local conversion of new-line marker character(s) in VMS, >> MS-whatever, UNIX, MAC, etc.; both can be read/written logically >> sequentially .... > > Yes, the "text is filtered binary stream" abstraction is very common. > But it is not universal. It is not true on MVS, for example. (When I > wrote "VMS" earlier, it was a typo for "MVS.") Indeed, it's partly > because of systems like MVS that C makes the distinction between text > and binary mode. If you insist on forcing that abstraction into Scheme > standards, then you make it impossible to sensibly implement Scheme on > many mainframe computers and anything else where that abstraction is > invalid. > -- > Bradd W. Szonye > http://www.szonye.com/bradd >