Subj : Perl::JAM (was: txt2pkt.pl)
To   : Johan Billing
From : Maurice Kinal
Date : Thu Feb 17 2005 02:06 pm

Hey Johan!

Feb 17 22:31 05, Johan Billing wrote to Maurice Kinal:

 JB> What do you mean by DOS-think?

Things like unneeded extra linefeeds, wasteful storage such as 16-bit integers 
when an 8-bit character would have been fine, etc.  A lack of creativity as 
well but that is a different can of worms.

 JB> 60% is a lot! Not that matters much with today's harddrives, but 
 JB> still. How do you propose to save that much space?

See my above comment.  Also there is way too much redundancy in the FTN headers 
but then those are needed for transportation to the uplink.  Not needed for 
local storage though, as all can be created from the muchly reduced archive.  
Works great in both priciple and practice.  I've been doing that for many 
years, especially with serial programming type stuff.  Much wasted bytes there 
but I guess the typical serial programmer feels the need to compensate for the 
lack of insight of DOS itself.  I can understand that way of thinking despite 
not being follower.

 MK>> What do you think?  Worth looking into?

 JB> Don't know, that depends on what you want to do. JAM is relatively 
 JB> flexible, so I suppose that some modifications could be made without 
 JB> breaking backwards-compatibility, but a major overhaul might be 
 JB> difficult. The major pain with the JAM format as I see it is that 
 JB> timestamps are supposed to be in local time, not GMT. I am sure that 
 JB> it made sense when the format was designed, but today it is just 
 JB> annoying.

Well I did download the specs from you so I'll have a looksee when I get there. 
 Offhand your module is well structured so it is fairly easy to just follow 
that and get a very good perspective on what is actually happening.  As far as 
timestamps go, I agree 100% with your above sentiment.

Life is good,
Maurice

--- Msged/LNX 6.1.2
 * Origin: Coffin Point - Ladysmith, BC Canada (1:153/401.1)

.