draft ANSI standard: needs your tomatoes

[Michael Meissner]

In article <738 at dg_rtp.UUCP> throopw at dg_rtp.UUCP (Wayne Throop) writes:
>> henry at utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
>
>>> ... The constants EXTERNAL_NAME_LENGTH (6), INCLUDE_FILES_NEST
>>> (4), and SOURCE_LINE_LENGTH (509) in particular seem to be very
>>> inadequate...
>> SOURCE_LINE_LENGTH is a bit curious, and the choice
>> of minimum value for it is truly bizarre.
>
>"Bizarre?" Really?  Isn't that the longest ANSI varying length format
>record which will fit into a 512-byte block?  Oops, no that would be
>508... hmmmmmmmm... where DOES that limit come from?
>
>Wayne Throop      <the-known-world>!mcnc!rti-sel!dg_rtp!throopw

As I remember it, it came from a record oriented system, that stored a length
word (2 bytes) at the front, and some sort of trailer at the end.  The last
byte (trailer) may have been the fortran carriage control character (0, 1, +,
etc.) that is prepended.

Michael Meissner   <the-known-world>!mcnc!rti-sel!dg_rtp!meissner