Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Time for 8 bit news, isn't it?????.
Message-ID: <1990Jul22.195243.28379@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <3119.269d97ea@mccall.com> <777@hades.ausonics.oz.au> <15688@bfmny0.BFM.COM> <==H&NB&@b-tech.uucp>
Date: Sun, 22 Jul 90 19:52:43 GMT

In article <==H&NB&@b-tech.uucp> zeeff@b-tech.ann-arbor.mi.us (Jon Zeeff) writes:
>Maybe we do need checksums.  At least we could throw away munged articles.
>Start doing that and I suspect that people would fix their software.

Geoff and I thought hard about this during C News development.  The trouble
with checksums is that most people would prefer a slightly mangled copy of
an article to no copy of the article.  There are all too many transmission
channels that do in fact slightly mangle articles (expanding tabs, fiddling
with the definition of newline, etc.).	Some early test versions of C News
did generate a checksum header.  We scrapped it because we could not think
of anything to do with it that people would want.
-- 
NFS:  all the nice semantics of MSDOS, | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
and its performance and security too.  |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry