Eric Thomas <ERIC@FRECP11>
Sun, 17 May 1987 00:42 SET
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I have written a LISTSERV-Punch conversion program in C, in addition to the
one I had written in (Turbo-) PASCAL. This one was entered and tested on the
mainframe and will not involve the keying problems I had with the PASCAL one
(curse the Laserjet again for printing 'l' and '1' exactly the same way).
However, I'd be curious to see if it can really work 'as is' on a UNIX system
as K&R tend to suggest in their "super-transportability" blurb... :-) Note
that even if it does, it doesn't mean I'm going to use C in the future for my
networking softwares. Its standard library's I/O functions may be easy to port
from one system to the other, but you should see how poor they are under VM
(there are extensions of course but these are not transportable at all)... I
wrote a trivial program to copy a file into another one using getchar() and
putchar(), and it is 8 times slower than good'ole CPU-hungry COPYFILE, and
consequently 80 times slower than a fast copier (5.73 secs C vs 0.07 secs
FCOPY -- 3000 lines file). If you use the lower level routines, the code runs
faster but is not transportable any more.
Anyway, the program is available from LISTSERV@FRECP11 as LPUN C (--> SEND
LISTSERV@FRECP11 GET LPUN C). I'd be interested in the result of your tests,
especially if your system doesn't support Netdata nor DISK DUMP files (in that
case please append a F=PUNCH to the command to get the file in raw (PUNCH)
format). You can get a sample input file by sending an "INFO REFCARD F=LP" to
the nearest LISTSERV.
Good luck, Eric
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