I wonder if it's even practical to continue to use the existing
portability guidelines without some update. For example the limit on
string length forces modules using TCP/IP to incur a lot of overhead
and run much more slowly than they would otherwise. More generally, if
OpenVistA is to interoperate with other applications, it will become
increasingly difficult to ignore the fact that other applications will
work with data in different sized chunks and different formats than we
are accustomed to in Standard MUMPS. It's great that there is an XML
parser in Kernel, but if we really want to *use* it, how long can we
ignore the fact that we can't support UTF-8, or even ISO-8859? Saving
incoming data into a global is great, but do we have to wait until the
connection is closed before we can even start parsing it? I know DNS an
other protocols will run over TCP, but can we really go on forever
ignoring UDP? There isn't even a standard way to write a server socket.
Running netstat while "listening" is illuminating because most MUMPS
implementations do nothing of the sort, they poll the device! Is it
really acceptable to make the network API completely implemntation dependent?

A practical man is a man who practices the errors of his forefathers. 
--Benjamin Disraeli
====
Greg Woodhouse 
[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
[EMAIL PROTECTED] 





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