Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!super!udel!gatech!rutgers!netnews.upenn.edu!eniac.seas.upenn.edu!ranjit
From: ranjit@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Ranjit Bhatnagar)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Posting small programs to c.s.amiga
Summary: No loss if not archived; also, is it better to post binary or source?
Message-ID: <5032@netnews.upenn.edu>
Date: 7 Sep 88 07:38:22 GMT
References: <4996@netnews.upenn.edu> <1686@datapg.MN.ORG>
Sender: news@netnews.upenn.edu
Reply-To: ranjit@eniac.seas.upenn.edu.UUCP (Ranjit Bhatnagar)
Organization: University of Pennsylvania
Lines: 42

In article <1686@datapg.MN.ORG> sewilco@datapg.MN.ORG (Scot E Wilcoxon) writes:
>ranjit@eniac.seas.upenn.edu.UUCP (Ranjit Bhatnagar) writes:
>>One thing I would very much like to see on c.sys.amiga is more code
>No, please.  Code in non-sources groups gets lost more easily than code
>in sources groups.  ...
>...  Because they were not in a source group, the
>source archive sites do not have these gems and they have mostly been lost.

My thought was that the kind of code to be posted in c.s.amiga would
be short but sweet things and instructive code fragments - things that
are fun and don't take up much space, but are not really important enough
to be archived - or if they are that important, the author would've
sent them to Fred Fish anyway.  One might feel that anything that isn't
worth archiving isn't worth posting in the first place; I think there
is a gray area between worthless code and code that should be kept
forever.  

For instance, my hopalong program was about 2 hours of work,
and would have been 30 minutes for anyone more experienced with Intuition.
Any moderately experienced programmer could have written it - yet nobody
did, because they didn't see the original article in Scientific American,
or they didn't think of it at the time - my posting gave everyone a
relatively effortless way to see a cute application of mathematics (those
without compilers needed only send mail to get a binary - I've sent about
15 copies out so far), but it was nothing worth saving forever.

I think it was the equivalent of an especially good joke on rec.humor.  
Something to chuckle over and then delete, or keep on a disk full of
similar short demos.

Well - what does everyone think?  And another question - if it were the
case that posting sources is OK, how about binaries?  For short programs
like this, my experience has been that uuencoded binary + source takes
up about 3 times as much space as source alone - is it worth tripling
the net load to make the program accessible to people without compilers?
Perhaps we should post only the binary, and send the source by request?

	- Ranjit



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