Make "terminator behavior" the default with --pretty=format: ?

Is there a reason, other than backward compatibility, for "--prety=format:" to have separator rather than terminator semantics?

I got bitten by this badly today, because I was processing the output of git log --pretty=format:... through sh, like this:

    git log --pretty=format:"%H %an" $old..$new | (
        while read commit author; do
           ... some processing ...
        done
    )

It turns out that the sh (which includes bash, dash, and zsh) "read" built-in doesn't process lines that don't end in newline. The effect was that the last line of output was silently ignored. It took some hours to track down.

sh is not the only tool with this problem; many traditional Unix tools don't process lines that don't end with newlines, and some require special exceptions and kludges (think diff). Because of this I believe "format:" should be changed to do terminator semantics, and tformat deprecated. If this is not feasible, then the documentation should recommend "tformat:", and only mention "format" as an afterthought, rather than the other way around.