Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!rutgers!cmcl2!brl-adm!umd5!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!hplabs!sdcrdcf!trwrb!aero!obrien
From: obrien@aerospace.aero.org (Michael O'Brien)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: Poll on shar formats
Message-ID: <309@antares.aero.org>
Date: 2 Jun 88 17:07:39 GMT
References: <868@fig.bbn.com> <1273@ucsfcca.ucsf.edu>
Reply-To: obrien@anpiel.UUCP (Michael O'Brien)
Organization: The Aerospace Corporation, El Segundo, CA
Lines: 15

In article <1273@ucsfcca.ucsf.edu> root@cca.ucsf.edu (Computer Center) writes:
>Any line beginning with an X gets scrod.
>Thos Sumner       (thos@cca.ucsf.edu)   BITNET:  thos@ucsfcca

Perfectly true.  Any line which already starts with an "X" will lose
it on extraction.  Inserting an "X" only before non-alphabetics leaves
the format ambiguous; the old format is unambiguous.  As far as
I'm concerned that should end the argument right there.

It might be that the new format could be fixed by also adding an
"X" to any line that already begins with one.  This seems unclean.
-- 
Mike O'Brien
obrien@aerospace.aero.org
{sdcrdcf,trwrb}!aero!obrien