zabetia@princeton.UUCP (Mahboud Zabetia) (05/07/86)
Why doesn't the author of packit include a binhexing procedure in his program so only one application would be needed to send files? Is that possible or am I missing something?? Thanks, -Mahboud Zabetian ...!princeton!zabetia
jimb@amdcad.UUCP (Jim Budler) (05/24/86)
In article <1283@princeton.UUCP> zabetia@princeton.UUCP (Mahboud Zabetian) writes: > >Why doesn't the author of packit include a binhexing procedure in his program >so only one application would be needed to send files? Is that possible or am >I missing something?? What you are missing is the fact that outside of Usenet, the BinHex 4 encoding mechanism is obsolete, and unused. All the newer terminal emulators including MacTerminal 2.0, Red Ryder, Freeterm have a built in encoding scheme called MacBinary. So encoding is not required in the packing program. The reason it is not used on Usenet is that it is a full 8-bit binary encoding scheme, where BinHex 4 is a binary to ascii encoding scheme. Only ASCII is guarenteed for Usenet mail paths, thus Usenet, the frontier, for once remains behind the rest of the world. -- Jim Budler Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (408) 749-5806 Usenet: {ucbvax,decwrl,ihnp4,allegra,intelca}!amdcad!jimb Compuserve: 72415,1200
jer@peora.UUCP (J. Eric Roskos) (05/28/86)
> What you are missing is the fact that outside of Usenet, the BinHex 4 > encoding mechanism is obsolete, and unused. All the newer terminal > emulators including MacTerminal 2.0, Red Ryder, Freeterm have a built in > encoding scheme called MacBinary. So encoding is not required in the > packing program. Is this format documented anywhere? I am presently working on an application where I need to convert a Macintosh file into a plain "flat" file. (Well, actually I'm not working on it at the moment, while I decide what is the best way to do the above... otherwise you'd have it already!) In my application (Lempel-Ziv compression) the contents of the file are unimportant; it needs to be treated just as the string of bytes that make it up. What I really wish is that the Macintosh toolbox included a "linear open" mode for files, where you could read sequentially from a file open in this mode and get, in turn, the finder information, the data fork, and the resource fork; and writing in this mode would create those in turn (so that writing and reading were inverses). This would be really helpful for a variety of applications where you want to take a Macintosh file and transmit it in a linear fashion. -- E. Roskos