AmiagBinary
I have finally forced myself to sit down and respond to the AmigaBinary
suggestions. Some comments:
1) It is useful to leave 128 byte block alignment in the standard. The reason
is to simplify implementation. It is quite simple to build a state machine
that the xmodem sender/receiver makes requests of. Alignment makes it much
easier to construct/break-down the transmission on-the-fly. This is also true
because several files must be opened/closed during the total process. File
opening/closing is slow compared to other operations and it is most desirable
to do this at "packet" boundaries.
2) I am concerned about the provisions for SQ/USQ/ARC in the protocol. I
think AmigaBinary should define a minimum implementation that everyone should
implement. As suggested, I think we will see terminal programs with several
different levels of implementation. The net result will be confusion to the
"non-expert". This objection may not be valid if "public-domain"
implementations of these routines are available to everyone.
3) An observation: the Amiga community assumes much more expertise on the
users part than the Mac community when using a modem. In particular, file
compression/packing has never really caught on in the Mac community (note: I
am not suggesting that it shouldn't be done). It is just important for us
"experts" to appreciate the problems of "non-experts" and design a process
that simplifies things as much as possible. Bill Bond