Re^3: Beginning Problems

[Anonymous Monk]

Most of the GUI text editors make it difficult to save in a plain-ascii plain-text format. They tend to use fancy file formats, save as UTF-16, insert byte-order-marks, or have odd newlines. Dropping down to a terminal-based text editor may be easier than teaching someone how to find the options to turn each of these off in a program you haven't used previously.

(And anyway, nano sucks. vim is better. And probably easier to learn, too.)

[Jenda]

Beg your pardon? Nobody would suggest using MS Word or anything similar (though we've had a post by someone who used something like that and saved the script in RTF format). I just tested this with Perl 5.8.9 (rather dated, don't you think) and it doesn't care whether the script is 8bit, utf8 with or without BOM, utf16LE or utf16BE. All work fine.

[choroba]

we've had a post by someone who used something like that and saved the script in RTF format

Yes. That was the OP.

[Anonymous Monk]

Very well, I did not check whether Perl had trouble with any of those issues, but a lot of other languages do. I've seen people have such problems caused by text editors that are by no means full-fledged word processors (you wouldn't consider TextEdit.app or Wordpad as one, would you), but instead bordering on programmer's editors (Notepad++ or similar). I've helped debug a bug caused by the editor saving a BOM by default [1], and seen problems caused by each one of those things I mentioned.

(But when I introduce them to vim, they don't have any of those bugs. They don't exactly get much code written either, for some reason...)

[1] may have been php and its header() function

[Anonymous Monk]

(And anyway, nano sucks. vim is better. And probably easier to learn, too.)

HA!