Path: utzoo!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!unix.cis.pitt.edu!dsinc!netnews.upenn.edu!netnews!mjd
From: mjd@saul.cis.upenn.edu (Mark-Jason Dominus)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Jeff Utnam sez....
Message-ID: <MJD.90Oct11154904@saul.cis.upenn.edu>
Date: 11 Oct 90 19:49:04 GMT
Sender: news@netnews.upenn.edu
Distribution: alt
Organization: University of Pennsylvania
Lines: 24
Approved: jefu@pawl.rpi.edu


	Years ago, when I still used `vi' most of the time,
I asked Jeff Putnam what the advantages of Emacs were.  I
remember that he said you could edit a binary file with it
and that I admitted that that might be useful someday.

	That day has come.  Our `rn' was malconfigured and
was giving Reply-To: addresses as

	Reply-To: mjd@grad1.cis.upenn.edu.UUCP (M-J. Dominus)

which of course is wrong.  (I never use `rn' myself, of
course; I use GNUS.  There's another use for Emacs.  Heh.)
So rather than reconfigure and recompile rn, I just hacked
out the `.UUCP' in the string constants in the binary.  (And
padded the end with five spaces, of course.)

	Sort of a run-of-the-mill hack, but it was nice to
finally use Emacs to do the thing I had in mind when I first
started using it, lo, these many years ago.
--

 In some sense a stochastic process can do better; at least it has a chance.
Mark-Jason Dominus 	  			    mjd@central.cis.upenn.edu