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From: diamond@csl.sony.JUNET (Norman Diamond)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Data compression algorithms
Message-ID: <10580@riks.csl.sony.JUNET>
Date: 20 Jul 89 00:57:56 GMT
References: <17193.24C32414@urchin.fidonet.org>
Reply-To: diamond@riks. (Norman Diamond)
Organization: Sony Computer Science Laboratory Inc., Tokyo, Japan
Lines: 24

In an article of <14 Jul 89 14:05:55 GMT>, (Richard Sargent) writes:

>>I think you'll be surprised. All codes from 128 through 255 are acceptable
[to MS-DOS].

In article <17193.24C32414@urchin.fidonet.org> Bob.Stout@p6.f506.n106.z1.fidonet.org (Bob Stout) writes:

>OK, you got me - DOS internally couldn't care less, but the docs for most  
>versions of DOS will tell you that only A-Z, 0-9, and most special characters  
>other than '*', '?', '.', and ' ' are legal. If you follow the rules (i.e.  
>guaranteed to work for all versions of DOS including those yet to come) laid  
>down my Microsoft and IBM, 64 characters should suffice. 

Some versions of MS-DOS are sold to the other 80% of the industrialized
world.  So some versions of MS-DOS permit some of those other characters
to be used.  The rules are not guaranteed and it is not a good idea to
"know" that 64 characters suffice.

--
-- 
Norman Diamond, Sony Computer Science Lab (diamond%csl.sony.jp@relay.cs.net)
  The above opinions are inherited by your machine's init process (pid 1),
  after being disowned and orphaned.  However, if you see this at Waterloo or
  Anterior, then their administrators must have approved of these opinions.