VAXstations  have recently  been installed  in my  school for  the LISP/PROLOG
student projects  (note: it doesn't mean  we're working on VAXstations  - that
would be just unthinkably great; it only  means we are using the VAXstation as
a  *CPU*, to  which 4  terminals are  connected, since  the PDP11  wasn't fast
enough for these Artificial Imbecility  projects). The VAXstations are running
under Ultrix(tm), and I  have been playing a bit with the  'man' command in an
attempt to increase my UUCP knowledge.
 
So  I did  MAN MAILADDR  (ooops  sorry I  meant  man mailaddr,  that is  'help
mailaddr' with 'alias help  "man !$:1 | more"' - for  some reason the NOSCROLL
key doesn't freeze the screen until half of another screen has been displayed,
and more is far from being a luxury under these circumstances). This shows you
a (long)  blurb about mail  addresses - RFC822,  UUCP, DECNET, etc.  There are
interesting things  to be learnt from  this helpfile. First, it  tells you how
the  system  will   automatically  translate  [log in to unmask]  into
[log in to unmask], for your convenience.  And then we start wondering
why the percent hack is still being  used: as I understood the helpfile, there
is  just NO  WAY  the  user may  ask  for  [log in to unmask] -  he'll
automatically get the  percent hack inserted. Since it is  a feature, it can't
be APARed (or whatever the verb is for DEC systems).
 
Another interesting thing is that the help  (I mean man) text contains a flame
about MULTICS systems which do not ignore case in the userid on incoming mail,
and require some  option to be specified  in the command line  to respect case
(that is, to  avoid converting everything to lowercase :-)  ). This strikes me
as particularly  funny, since I  have never  had any problem  with mixed/upper
case when sending to MULTICS systems - actually, I can't remember encountering
this kind  of problems with  systems other than UNIX.  As we'd say  in France,
that's just another case of "do what I say, not what I do" :-)
 
  Eric
 
Disclaimer: my views are not necessarily those of AT&T nor DEC :-)