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From: allbery@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon Allbery)
Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.admin,news.misc
Subject: Re: Messages with >80-character lines
Message-ID: <4928@ncoast.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 22-Oct-87 20:25:22 EST
Article-I.D.: ncoast.4928
Posted: Thu Oct 22 20:25:22 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 25-Oct-87 14:31:49 EST
References: <7523@g.ms.uky.edu> <21314@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <7526@g.ms.uky.edu>
Reply-To: allbery@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon Allbery)
Followup-To: news.software.b
Organization: Cleveland Public Access UN*X, Cleveland, Oh
Lines: 24
Xref: mnetor news.software.b:904 news.admin:1230 news.misc:1061

As quoted from <7526@g.ms.uky.edu> by david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- Resident E-mail Hack):
+---------------
| In article <21314@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> fair@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU (Erik E. Fair) writes:
| >That's not reasonable. The reasonable approach is to do a trivial
| >encapsulation or encoding that makes it possible to move USENET
| >articles (no matter what their characteristics are) through BITNET,
| >or any other strange network.
| 
| BUT ... compress and atob/btoa don't run on the IBM 308x that's
| out other neighbor on BITNET.  ALSO, in both cases their underlying
| operating systems has that record-oriented mentality.
+---------------

At least one Fido-compatible system uses an encoding such that lines end in
^M and paragraphs end in ^M^J; and the Fido standard is paragraph-oriented,
NOT line-oriented, so as to encourage word wrapping.  I suggest that a system
like this, with ^M inserted between words to force lines to < 80 characters,
would work fine without breaking filesystems based on fixed-length records
rather than variable- length ones (i.e. lines).  (For UNIX, ^M and ^J would
seem to be natural choices.  These can easily be changed to ^M and ^M^J for
non-UNIX sites, a' la "text mode" umodem and kermit.)
-- 
Brandon S. Allbery		     necntc!ncoast!allbery@harvard.harvard.edu
  {{harvard,mit-eddie}!necntc,well!hoptoad,sun!mandrill!hal}!ncoast!allbery