Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!amdahl!dlb!ardent!rap
From: rap@ardent.UUCP (Rob Peck)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Squeeze for Amiga (was: Re:Unix)
Message-ID: <328@ardent.UUCP>
Date: 10 Mar 88 17:38:27 GMT
References: <301@brambo.UUCP> <9850@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP>
Organization: Dana Computer, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA
Lines: 29
Summary: we got a volunteer...


I was talking to Bill Hawes, author of AREXX, about the fact that
folks sometimes come out with little whizbang utilities that take
up a very few bytes of space, and that it was a real waste to
think that an a.out file of the wrong size would leave a lot
of wasted space in file sectors - if there was such a thing
as a 100 byte utility, it'd be nice to squeeze 4 or 5 of them
into the space that would normally be taken up by one 500 byte
utility (sectors on the amiga are 488 bytes long, and under ffs,
are 512 bytes long).   So I suggested that someone create a
pseudo-arc loader and corresponding pseudo-arc creator program
to create, append, remove, list, load (whatever) these tiny
programs from a single file.

He said that if I could come up with the specs for such a beast, he'd
create it.  To keep it really simple, I suggested off the bat that
compression and expansion might not be necessary.  (Also dont want
the load to take any longer on average than the normal load thru
the AmigaDOS loader.)

Also, to keep it simple, I thought that adding to an pseudo-arc 
and loading from it would happen so very much more often than deleting, 
so it would be appropriate maybe to have a standalone utility that
would create a new pseudo-arc out of an old one when a piece
is removed.

Please EMAIL your suggestions to me and I will collect them and
pass them on to Bill and post a summary to the net.

Rob Peck			...ihnp4!hplabs!ardent!rap