JDA@NIHCU.BITNET.UUCP (06/02/87)
I too had problems attempting to install the EXECUTIONER program.
Mine, however, had nothing to do with the period character at the
start of each line. I believe that my problem was caused by the
ASCII to EBCDIC translation at the ARPANET to BITNET gateway. (It is
my understanding that ARPANET is comprised mostly of ASCII machines,
while BITNET is an EBCDIC network.) Specifically, my trouble was
caused by the two characters left curly bracket ($FB) and right curly
bracket ($FD). The 6th character in the first line after the line
"F00G" was the first right curly bracket in the file and the 38th
character in the next line is the first left curly bracket. These
two characters frequently cause problems in translations from ASCII
to EBCDIC. These appeared as x'C0' and x'D0' in the file that Grant
Delaney posted to INFO-APPLE which is the IBM "standard" assignment
for left and right curly brackets, respectively. When I edited the
file on my mainframe to change these values to x'8B' and x'9B' (which
is the TN print train assignment), my problems were solved.
My experience just goes to show the need for a program such as
EXECUTIONER. However, if the entire program had been sent in
EXECutable form (i.e., not in packed mode), my problem would never
have occurred (though the file would have been much larger). If you
are just transferring files between two Apples, then you should have
no problems using the packed modes. The same should be true when
transferring through an all ASCII network. But be careful if any
ASCII/EBCDIC translations occur along the way.
The purpose of this message is to warn others of this pitfall and to
ask if Glen Bredon (the author of EXECUTIONER) might consider
changing the packing algorithm so that it avoided "problem"
characters (I realize that this would result in a larger file). It
seems that everyone has agreed on the translation of upper and lower
case letters (A-Z and a-z), digits (0-9), and the following
punctuation:
period (".")
comma (",")
slash ("/")
semicolon (";")
colon (":")
apostrophe ("'")
quotation mark ('"')
equal ("=")
plus ("+")
minus ("-")
left parentheses ("(")
right parentheses (")")
asterisk ("*")
ampersand ("&")
question mark ("?")
Unfortunately, almost everything else is a matter of controversy and
can cause problems (e.g., delete, cent, vertical bar, exclamation
point, not, split bar, underline, accent or left quote, tilde or
degree, brackets, braces, back slash, circumflex, at sign, pound
sign, dollar sign).