[Stratoscope]

When "working as intended" means "doesn't work at all", I consider it a bug.

Take a look at the first screenshot on the announcement page and then tell me it's working as intended.

[Latty]

Is it a bug that opening an excel spreadsheet in notepad gives something unreadable? Linux line endings are a type of file that notepad was never designed for.

[Stratoscope]

I suppose it depends on whether I'm wearing my "user hat" or my "Notepad developer hat".

As a Notepad developer, I might agree with you that Unix line ending support is a new feature.

As a user, I double-click a text file and it opens in Notepad. It opens fine in all of my other editors, but is garbled in Notepad. That feels like a bug.

I don't try to open .xlsx files in Notepad, so it isn't very relevant to me as a user that Notepad won't open them. If I did open one accidentally, I'd think "D'oh! That's not a text file!"

But this is just terminology. Files that Notepad couldn't open usefully before will now work. That's a good thing, whatever we call it.

[swebs]

To be more precise, they're Unix line endings. So yeah, I'd consider it a bug if it didn't support what has been the standard line ending format since the 60's.

[ThrowawayR2]

> So yeah, I'd consider it a bug if it didn't support what has been the standard line ending format since the 60's.

The standard line ending format in the '60s, which was the height of the mainframe era, would probably have been the newline character in IBM's EBCIDC encoding, which differs from the value used for ASCII (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline). Unix didn't really start taking off until around the early '80s IIRC.

Windows properly supported the newline format for its platform of lineage (CP/M + DOS) which also didn't start taking off until the early '80s. Not sure that Unix has any real claim to precedence here.

[mark-r]

The standard line ending of the '70s was CR/LF, because the printers commonly used as interactive terminals required them both. I wonder how that worked on the first Unix systems?

[cesarb]

> I wonder how that worked on the first Unix systems?

Probably the same way it still works on today's Unix systems: it converts NL to CR+NL on output. See the manpage for the stty command:

  Output settings:
    [-]onlcr
      translate newline to carriage return-newline

[JdeBP]

The standard in the 1960s, USAS X3.4-1968, actually prescribed both forms.

But (in §4.1.2.2) it "strongly recommended" that people "use CR and LF to obtain the effect of New Line".