Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cbmvax!darren
From: darren@cbmvax.commodore.com (Darren Greenwald)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Are applications using the Clipboard?
Keywords: IFF, CAT, FTXT, ILBM, Clipboard, Applications.
Message-ID: <16013@cbmvax.commodore.com>
Date: 21 Nov 90 14:56:44 GMT
References: <2250@lpami.wimsey.bc.ca>
Reply-To: darren@cbmvax.commodore.com (Darren Greenwald)
Organization: Commodore, West Chester, PA
Lines: 37

In article <2250@lpami.wimsey.bc.ca> lphillips@lpami.wimsey.bc.ca (Larry Phillips) writes:
>In <1990Nov19.114706.6762@ida.liu.se>, micja@IDA.LiU.SE (Michael Jansson) writes:
>>In article <2235@lpami.wimsey.bc.ca> lphillips@lpami.wimsey.bc.ca (Larry Phillips) writes:
>
>>>In my opinion, the seeming insistence on IFF data format has severely limited
>
>>Yes, and it has to be that so that applications has a common 'language'.
>
>Well, how's this for starters.... allow (I know it's _allowed_, but more like
>condone), IFF and ASCII both. ASCII is reasonably easy to differentiate from
>IFF, since readable text-only data could only conform to the IFF format by an
>extremely unlikely set of data. Barring differentiation by content alone,
>

Hey, Murphy's law remember :grin:
>
>But... it may be too late for this. More's the pity.
>
>-larry
>
As you noted, its not allowed - the clipboard.device is IFF smart, and
uses the info passed in to determine how much memory its going to need;
a pure ASCII format is currently not possible.  Maybe what we need is
tools to make reading/writing of IFF easier (we do have iffparse now).
We may also want to consider a new type of IFF file - call it DATA or
something which means the next X number of characters is just data of
no particular type.  IFF TEXT has some limits on what you can put in it,
which means its not really suitable for text editors which allow you
to edit binary sequences (and many Amiga text editors do).


--------------------------------------------------------------
Darren M. Greenwald | Commodore-Amiga Software Engineering   
                    | USENET: uunet!cbmvax!darren                       
--------------------------------------------------------------
Quote: "It would be impossible to discuss the subject without
        a common frame of reference." - Spock