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Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!husc6!rutgers!ucsd!nprdc!malloy
From: malloy@nprdc.arpa (Sean Malloy)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
Subject: Re: PK361.EXE
Keywords: foot removal from mouth
Message-ID: <750@james.nprdc.arpa>
Date: 10 Aug 88 22:01:09 GMT
References:  <356@marob.MASA.COM>  <11814@steinmetz.ge.com>
Reply-To: malloy@nprdc.arpa (Sean Malloy)
Organization: Navy Personnel R&D Center, San Diego
Lines: 33

In article <11814@steinmetz.ge.com> davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen) writes:
|In article  msmith@topaz.rutgers.edu (Mark Robert Smith) writes:
|
|| Steve,  Sorry, but stealing somebody else's market is a standard
|| practice inthe world of software.  Else, why are word processors able
|| to read WordStar's format?  Why can Excel read Lotus 123?  Why can
|| Paradox import dBase and RBase files?  It is standard to attempt to
|| grab somebody else's users.
|
|  What's not standard is to write Wordstar or 1-2-3 files which can not
|be read by the original program. The idea seems to be "once you use my
|program you can never go back."

Why should Phil Katz be any different than some of the big software
houses? Lotus 1-2-3 v2.0 .WK1 files can't be read by Lotus 1-2-3 v1.A,
but 1-2-3 automatically writes a .WK1 file when you save your
spreadsheet. You can read a WordPerfect 4.2 file into WordPerfect 5.0,
but the file WordPerfect 5.0 writes can't be read by Wordperfect 4.2 --
and there's no way to convert it back, while Lotus at least has a WK1
to WKS conversion utility.

If you add a new function to a program that reads the function types
out of the file the program is operating on, then there's no way you
can keep total downward compatibility, because the old program won't
know how to operate on the new information. At least PKARC had the
-oct flags that let you write ARC files that SEA's ARC program would
read. That's more than WordPerfect does.


	Sean Malloy
	Navy Personnel Research & Development Center
	San Diego, CA 92152-6800
	malloy@nprdc.arpa