[nfoz]

> It’s an abuse of the newline character, which is meant to represent a new line

I also disagree with hard line wraps, but I wouldn't use this justification.

There isn't really such thing as a newline character. From ASCII we have line-feed and carriage-return characters intended for typewriters. There are conventions for how to interpret these as hard line-breaks in text, but they vary by platform. But even once you've picked how to represent your "new line" character -- does it denote a "line separator" (windows), or just a "line ending" (linux)? There's no real answer; just convention. (The difference often shows up when you consider whether you should leave one after the last line at the end of the document.)

We can't often look at ASCII or much of Unicode and ask "what is the meaning of this character" as if there's some canonical truth. IMO

[alexmingoia]

Whichever character is used for a line ending/separator, it’s still wrong to conflate it with word wrapping.