Newline
<character, jargon> /n[y]oo'li:n/
Line feed or other character sequence used to terminate a line of text.
Unix uses
line feed as its text line terminator - a Bell-Labs-ism rather than a
Berkeleyism.
Interestingly (and unusually for Unix jargon), it is said to have originally been an
IBM usage.
Though the term "newline" appears in
ASCII standards, it never caught on in the general computing world before
Unix.
The encoding of line feed as "\n" in
C and
Unix strings comes from this name.
The term has been used more generally for any
end of line character, character sequence (e.g.
crlf), or operation (like
Pascal's writeln procedure or
Lisp 1.5's
terpri) required to terminate a text record or separate lines.
[
Jargon File]
