Docstrings considered too complicated

[Grant Edwards]

On 2010-03-03, Grant Edwards <invalid at invalid.invalid> wrote:
> On 2010-03-03, Gregory Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
>> Grant Edwards wrote:
>>
>>> Just a mediocre copy of the CP/M filesystem, which was in turn
>>> copied from DEC's RSTS or RSX.
>>
>> It was actually an improvement over CP/M's file system. CP/M
>> didn't have hierarchical directories
>
> Neither did the original MS-DOS filesystem.
>
>> or timestamps and recorded file sizes in 128-byte blocks
>> rather than bytes.
>
> I thought that was true of the original MS-DOS filesystem as
> well, but I wouldn't bet money on it.

I definitely remember that old MS-DOS programs would treat
Ctrl-Z as an EOF marker when it was read from a text file and
would terminate a text file with a Ctrl-Z when writing one.

I don't know if that was because the underlying filesystem was
still did everything in blocks or if it was because those
MS-DOS programs were direct ports of CP/M programs.  I would
have sworn that the orignal MS-DOS file API was FCB based and
worked almost exactly like CP/M.  IIRC, the "byte stream" API
showed up (in the OS) sever versions later.  The byte stream
API was implemented by many compiler vendor's C libraries on
top of the block-oriented FCB API.

-- 
Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards        Yow! I had a lease on an
                                  at               OEDIPUS COMPLEX back in
                              gmail.com            '81 ...