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Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: net.works
Subject: Re: xeroX slime ad warning
Message-ID: <6621@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 24-Apr-86 17:44:31 EST
Article-I.D.: utzoo.6621
Posted: Thu Apr 24 17:44:31 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 24-Apr-86 17:44:31 EST
References: <719@hoptoad.uucp>, <443@bambi.UUCP>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 18

> ...the Xerox Star software
> on which this machine is based is light-years beyond Suns for copying data
> between windows.  What it does it pass structure around, real manipulable
> objects with operations -- not just cutting and pasting ASCII text...

The other side of this is that Unix would not have one-tenth as many useful
utilities if everything had to understand complex structured objects on the
input.  Don't be so quick to assume that ASCII-text-based interchange is
grossly inferior.  One can always encode structured objects in ASCII, with
some penalty in speed and complexity over passing them directly... and then
a lot of other programs can manipulate them too.

There is a lot to be said for structured objects, mind you, but it's not
as one-sided as you suggest.
-- 
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