Read this if you're having trouble unpacking Tcl

[Michael Meissner]

In article <39510310 at bfmny0.BFM.COM> tneff at bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff) writes:

| I don't deny for a minute that uuencoding is the only safe way to pass
| someone's 132-wide ^M-delimited C code through netnews.  What I am
| saying is that such stuff SHOULDN'T BE PASSED!  It's not generally
| useful.  The more disparate the net gets, the LESS useful
| platform-specific source formats become.

Pray tell how do you deal with the following situation (which I did
run into):

Site A posts something that has tabs in it, but is otherwise clean.

Site B (for bitnet) converts the tabs into spaces and passes it on.

Side C unpacks it, and it doesn't work at all, because make wants tabs
in front of the commands, or the next patch (which goes by way of site
D instead of B) doesn't apply because the lines don't match.

| I also think the burden of portability should be on the shoulders of the
| author.  It takes ONE session with a reformatter to render a program
| net-portable; it takes THOUSANDS of cumulative sessions, successful or
| otherwise, at thousands of user desks worldwide if we make the readers
| do the reformatting.  It also promotes variant versions.

Programs aren't the only things that are sent.  I've seen ASCII data
files which are not meant for human eyes, that have hundreds of
characters, and no form of continuation characters.
--
Michael Meissner	email: meissner at osf.org		phone: 617-621-8861
Open Software Foundation, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02142

Considering the flames and intolerance, shouldn't USENET be spelled ABUSENET?