Re: newlines and code page conversion

[Terrence Enger]

At 18:12 2003-05-13 -0400, Ross Patterson wrote:
>On Tuesday 13 May 2003 05:25 pm, Terrence Enger wrote:
>> As part of my
>> changes I am replacing literal '\012' in the source code by '\n' and then
>> making the program explicitly transate to/from ASCII for the client/server
>> socket communications.  
>
>I hope you're not talking about changing the over-the-wire protocol, that 
>would be "bad".  As would performing wholesale ASCII-EBCDIC translation on 
>the connection data (think about binary files - are they shipped as binary
or 
>encoded somehow, and if so is it safely translatable?).  Of course, if
you've 
>tried doing any kind of network programming in an EBCDIC world before, this 
>is old news to you.  As is the advice to make the code page ids configurable.

No, I do not plan to change the over-the-wire protocol.  (We ECDICers are 
great people, but we are too few to take over the world <grin>.)

All I was talking about here is the way the source code expresses the string 
and character constants with which the program controls the protocol.  The 
ASCII-EBCDIC translation is of narrower interest.  If the translation is ever 
taken into the official source at all, I think it needs to be conditioned by 
"compatibility cruft".

As for transferring binary files ...  Well, I have been trying not to think 
ahead to that.  My hope is that the way will become clearer as I become more 
familiar with the code.

I shall have to think about configurable code page ids.  I could be coming 
back with more questions!

>
>> Particularly, does anyone know of a platform where this would cause
>> problems?
>
>I've never examined the wire-line protocol, but CVS normalizes the MS-DOS
CRLF 
>linends to the Unix LF (aka \n) someplace, probably on the client side.

Indeed, I would like to make code page issues as unobtrusive to the user as 
differences in line endings are now.  It remains to be seen how close I can 
come to that.

>
>> Thank you all for your attention and thoughts.
>
>Hey, it's an ASCII world out there, we EBCDICers (ex-VMer in my case) need
to 
>band together :-)

Thank you for your help.

>-- 
>Ross A. Patterson
>Chief Technology Officer
>CatchFIRE Systems, Inc.
>5885 Trinity Parkway, Suite 220
>Centreville, VA  20120
>(703) 563-4164
>
>
>