You are right of course. In my defence I am rarely in full-blown portability mode. But I am frequently faced with writing code that will run under both windows and Linux, on essentially the same files, shared under SAMBA. Back when I used chomp I got seriously bitten, thought I had lost a ton of data somewhere. (I just wasn't seeing it because of the \r.)

I believe in anticipating future problems, but there is a limit to how much I worry about in my own narrow set of problems. :-)