compressed postings (was Re: Read this...>

[Steve Lamont]

In article <49 at unigold.UUCP> kianusch at unigold.UUCP (Kianusch Sayah Karadji) writes:
>... but also if somebody really has problems typing 'man uucico', or 
>'man uncompress' ... well they shouldn't be trying to compile any
>of the source codes posted here, because they woulnd't know what
>they were doing anyway, and that could be dangerouse for them... :-)

In the words of Rocky Rococo, "Maybe yes, maybe no." :-)

Please remember that there are all sorts of different folks reading and
posting to the net these days.  I don't see that it should be mandatory for a
net.reader to be a genuine UN*X guru simply to use sources posted.  Of
course, some base level of knowledge should be assumed, but why place any more
obstacles before the reader than necessary.

Using myself as an example, I'm not precisely what you would call a UN*X guru,
but I am a fairly competent and, if I do say so myself, intelligent
programmer.  I know enough to get around in UN*X, how to write Makefiles,
compile, edit, and so forth, but I don't involve myself with things like
networking and operating systems innards more often than absolutely necessary.
Why should I?  I'm a scientific visualization programmer -- that's what I'm
paid to do.  Until the poster mentioned it, I'd never heard of uucico (though
I did look up and scan the man page for it, so I guess I don't have any
problems with man (-:).  I've never had to deal with uucp.

What does all this blather mean?  Well, I guess what I'm saying is that source
postings should be just that -- source postings.  Nice, friendly, readable
source code (even if mucked up a bit with sharisms) that a person of moderate
intelligence and skill can look at to see whether they're worth bothering
with.

I like to see the source in a posting so that I can skim a little bit of it
and determine whether it is worth saving (in my case, since I'm a guest on
this system, saving means that I have to mail the postings to another account
on my local machine in Monterey).  While, as Kent suggests, I don't read each
and every line of a source posting, I do read at least two or three screensful
before I make that decision, just to get an idea of what I'm dealing with, to
see if the code is well written or is garbage, and so forth.

Some issue has been made of EBCDIC and ASCII in transmission.  I don't know
what others' experiences are compared to mine, but I've never had any trouble
with garbled characters, even though my local machine is an Amdahl, speaking
VM/CMS and EBCDIC.  Since this point was raised recently, I did a little
experiment, sending mail messages containing all of the ASCII printable
characters back and forth.  Everything seemed to make it back and forth
intact.  Things looked a little strange on a 3278 terminal, but all of the
bits were there.

Unless someone can present documentary evidence to the contrary, I'd suggest
that the ASCII/EBCDIC issue is somewhat specious.

The summary?  Cleartext, please.

							spl (the p stands for
							please don't use the
							cent sign in any of
							your source code...)
-- 
Steve Lamont, SciViGuy -- (408) 646-2572 -- a guest at network.ucsd.edu --
NPS Confuser Center / Code 51 / Naval Postgraduate School / Monterey, CA 93943
"... most programmers don't even bother going to the metal on machines where
the metal is painful and there's no light to see by..." -J. Eric Townsend