Re: [Alephmodular-devel] Random rumblings on files and errors

[Michael A. <mdm...@ya...>]

--- Dietrich Epp <die...@zd...> wrote:
> 
> On Wednesday, January 29, 2003, at 08:44 , Br'fin
> wrote:
> 
> > I've been mucking with a spare copy of AM,
> actually trying to implement 
> > what I have described in my draft so far. Which is
> of course turning up 
> > more areas to work upon.
> >
> > Like, most files are going to be opened in binary
> mode. So this makes a 
> > reasonable default, however, some files in the
> future are going to be 
> > text based, so we should support that as well. I
> was thinking of 
> > exposing the iostream openmode flags as part of
> the 
> > open_file_for_reading/writing business. And just
> have it default to 
> > binary. You could clear it of course by passing 0
> for the mode (or a 
> > suitably equivalent definition)
> 
> Is there really a difference between text and binary
> mode?  I thought 
> that was all arcane.  I've never liked C++
> iostreams, they have only 
> served to add compile time and code size in the
> megabytes to my projects.

Yes, there is a difference.  I've had files
incorrectly read when the wrong one is used.  Just
like ASCII vs. Binary FTP it can become a problem when
newlines are converted.  This happens on at leat Win32
because a \n in code becomes a \r\n in the file and
vise versa.  I've seen quite a few bugs happen that
way.

Michael D. Adams
mdm...@ya...



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