bradn@tekecs.UUCP (Brad Needham) (07/25/83)
When the problem of mailers converting a pair of backslashes into a single backslash first showed up, many people suggested using uuencode(1) to avoid the problem. Unfortunately, given the appropriate (printable) input, uuencode can generate a pair of backslashes! As a hack to get my lex file onto the net, I translated all the backslashes into '@' (a character not used in C) and arranged to have the receiving site convert them back into backslashes. I *thought* that one of the advantages of a computer network was the ability to share source -- to reliably send arbitrary data from one site to another. It looks like it'll be awhile before this mess becomes a real network. Brad Needham