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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!hou3c!MRC@SU-SCORE.ARPA
From: MRC@SU-SCORE.ARPA (Mark Crispin)
Newsgroups: net.mail.msggroup
Subject: Re: quoted names
Message-ID: <878@hou3c.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 17-Oct-84 13:26:50 EDT
Article-I.D.: hou3c.878
Posted: Wed Oct 17 13:26:50 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 21-Oct-84 09:33:55 EDT
Sender: ka@hou3c.UUCP (Kenneth Almquist)
Lines: 15
To: mrose@UCI-750A.ARPA
Cc: WANCHO@SIMTEL20.ARPA, don.provan@CMU-CS-A.ARPA, msggroup@BRL.ARPA
In-Reply-To: Message from "Marshall Rose " of Wed 17 Oct 84 07:10:20-PDT
Postal-Address: 725 Mariposa Ave. #103; Mountain View, CA 94041
Phone: (415) 497-1407 (Stanford); (415) 968-1052 (residence)

I confess that MM and friends are guilty of botching the syntax of the
date.  That's because, with all the zillions of date/time syntaxes the
TOPS-20 IDTIM% system call can parse and ODTIM% can generate, RFC 822
takes great pains to pick one that isn't among those zillions.  Actually,
I don't think it was really done deliberately, but one wonders.

So, the code picks a nearest approximation, and DEC has been asked to
define a new bit meaning "RFC 822 format".  Where we blow it is that
we don't have a comma after the day-of-week and have a hyphen before
the timezone.

I swear, though, if after we finally get into full compliance with RFC 822
dates they change the syntax to something incompatible AGAIN, I'll get
the %&#@!
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