Why is \n 012? - TUHS

9 Mar 2003

Lehey wondered,

...
  A thing that has puzzled me almost for ever is why the
newline
 character in C is 012 and not 015.  Does anybody have any insight? 
And Haerr speculated 
...
  Well, my take on this is that C was developed with
UNIX,
 of course, and UNIX early on decided to use a single
 character rather than a two-char (CRLF) sequence for
 end-of-lines... 
This came via Unix from Multics.  My Multics
Programmers' Manual (1969) says, in reference
to its use of the ASCII character set: "Reference:
USA Standard X3.4-1967," and describes the LF
character, with code octal 012, "New Line.
Move carriage to the left edge of the next
line.... ASCII LF is used for this function."

I believe that either this or some other version
of ASCII standard blessed (or condoned) one
of the interpretations of the 012 character
for the new-line function.  However, I haven't
turned up hard evidence of this, despite several
conversations with Eric Fischer, who has
kept track of various versions of the standards.

In the event, various of the terminals used early
on did implement the NL function.  E.g. the
IBM 1050 and 2741 terminals (decidedly
non-ASCII) had a new-line function, like
a typewriter, no CR, but sometimes an
"Index" character that moved the paper
but not the printing element.  The TTY 37
had an optional interpretation of 012 as
NL.  Of course, other terminals required
separate CR and LF characters.

The choice of a single character to separate
lines still seems wise if you're using a byte-stream
model.

	Dennis