This thread is relevant to IBM-MAIN because it discusses file handling,
specifically in CMS.
Thanks PHSiii for cluing me in, and thanks Curtis and others for
checking it out.
I had not heard about this logic. (Been a while since I was on Netnews.
Kinda miss it. Don't have time for it.)
WARNING:
Logic which depends on invisible mark-up is dangerous.
That blank after the dashes is easily stripped by any number of processors.
In the days when MIME was being cooked-up, I appealed to the email lords
"please let white space be insignificant". They refused.
So now, the divider between header and body *must* be CR/LF/CR/LF. In
other words, it cannot be CR/LF/whitespace/CR/LF.
("Insignificant" is not the right word. Linear white space is widely
defined as one or more blanks and/or tabs. Let the reader understand.)
This was particularly frustrating when I was a systems programmer
running VM/CMS.
CMS does not have the concept of an empty record. A record must have at
least one byte. (Blank lines contain at least one space character.)
This is arguably stupid, but it's history (like tabs in makefiles), and
we had to take special steps in CMS land when processing email.
Thankfully Pipeles *does* allow an empty record, but that's a whole
nutha story.
Dependence on byte-wise white space is a problem beyond email.
Witness 'diff' versus 'diff -b' where the latter treats certain white
space as described above.
I regularly (manually) add a signature and had no idea that the "right"
way was to have dash-dash-blank-newline.
In many cases, my sig is just the single line "-- R; <><", but it varies.
Then too, what if I happened to have dash-dash-blank in the body of a
message? Oy vey.
Now, if I let TBird apply the sig, maybe TBird gets it right. Fine. I'll
go tinker with that again later.
Usenet signatures are also history, so I'm willing to play it that way.
But I gotta ask the global programming community: DON'T DO THIS (anymore).
For further reading, consider the message delimiter in traditional Unix
mailbox files. (Not on-topic w/r/t lwsp, but another example of poorly
thought precedent.)
--
R; <><
On 7/10/24 1:10 PM, Pew, Curtis G wrote:
On Jul 10, 2024, at 12:07 PM, Phil Smith III<[email protected]> wrote:
Shmuel, I see the two hyphens but not the space in yours. Did it get stripped
by your client? Or LISTSERV? Might make sure it's really still there...
--
...phsiii
(note sig in above as a test to see whether a properly formatted one DOES get
stripped)
It looks like LISTSERV is stripping the space. My sig is properly formatted too
but the space is missing after it comes back.
--
Curtis Pew
ITS
[email protected]
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
