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From: coolidge@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu (John Coolidge)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Require "Lines:"?
Summary: true...
Message-ID: <1989Sep6.033902.13174@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 6 Sep 89 03:39:02 GMT
References: <1989Sep3.160552.25045@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu> <47596@oliveb.olivetti.com>
Sender: news@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu
Reply-To: coolidge@cs.uiuc.edu (John Coolidge)
Organization: U of Illinois, CS Dept., Systems Research Group
Lines: 46

jerry@olivey.olivetti.com (Jerry Aguirre) writes:
>In article <1989Sep3.160552.25045@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu> I write:
>>Finally: If Lines: is to be required, I'd like to see it expanded (either
>>by the same name or by some new name, Size: for instance) to carry wc-like
>>information. The byte count is clearly useful, and I can envision word
>>count information having some value at all. If it's required that we spend
>>the time and space to provide Lines:, let's at least generate a bunch of
>>useful information all at once.
>This came up before in a discussion about NNTP batching.  A byte count
>set by the orriginating system is not going to be portable to other
>systems.
> [reasons: file system, line format, etc., deleted]

Quite true, and I didn't mean to imply otherwise. That doesn't mean an
estimate of it is not useful, especially if the count was actually
'characters' --- the number of user-readable characters in the message.

>The "lines" header is not a CRC for checking whether the article has
>been corrupted.  It is not going to help in article transfer or
>batching.  It is useful for getting a "human" estimate of the size of an
>article though a count of "words" or "printing" characters would be more
>useful.

Exactly. Neither Lines: or any replacement will be useful for anti-
corruption, transport, etc., reasons. They're a user-information
feature, similar to Keywords:, Summary:, Organization:, and the like.
The time a character count is useful is when there are 500 lines in the
article, 450 of which are blank. The time a line count is useful is:
the same one (surprise :-)) so that you know the next 450 lines will be
blank. Words could be a useful measure as well, perhaps the most useful
of all.

I think the overall point is: Lines:, Size:, or whatever-we-call-it:,
is a very useful header. There's a good chance it ought to be a required
header. Right now it isn't, and it's wrong to flame a system for not
providing clearly optional features. Some sort of consensus needs to
be found as to whether whatever-it-is is to be required, or not, and
that needs to be encapsulated in a new standard. Until then, anarchy
reigns --- and let the reader beware!

--John

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
John L. Coolidge     Internet:coolidge@cs.uiuc.edu   UUCP:uiucdcs!coolidge
Of course I don't speak for the U of I (or anyone else except myself)
Copyright 1989 John L. Coolidge. Copying allowed if (and only if) attributed.