>I was hampered by  the fact that the copy of  COUNTRY FILE on LISTSERV's
>A-disk  is dated  11/13/88 and  contains possible  errors (ET  for Egypt
>while BITEARN NODES  has EG; I haven't checked to  see which is correct)
>and omissions (KW was not listed at all; that's Kuwait).
 
The file used  to be manually maintained  from the data at  the bottom of
NETCNTRY  EXEC,  which is  the  "official"  source of  that  information.
Unfortunately, NETCNTRY EXEC is an exec  of around 600 lines containing a
lot of comments, a lot of  EXEC2 code to provide a NAMEFIND-like function
to the user, and a small amount of country data in the middle (around the
end of the file). The only "safe" way  to extract the data is to call the
EXEC,  which takes  around 0.5  to 1.0  sec of  CPU time  on a  small 370
machine. I never  managed to convince Berthold that this  should be split
into an EXEC and  a data file, so I made my own,  and updated it manually
as new countries were added.
 
The problem is  that this is something easily  forgotten and particularly
error-prone. I  am pretty  sure that  Egypt was  initially entered  as ET
because I remember it struck me as  something funny at the time, but when
you update the  file manually, looking for new countries,  it is easy not
to notice that an error in an "old" country code has been corrected.
 
Anyway in order to avoid this problem  in the future I wrote an EXEC that
builds the file from NETCNTRY EXEC (since I have a local NETSERV, I don't
need to worry about which version of NETCNTRY I am calling, by definition
I have  the latest  one available in  my area). I  will rebuild  the file
whenever NETCNTRY  EXEC is updated and  include it in the  release update
shipments.  For now,  I  have made  a 16E-006O  fix  file containing  the
"current" version of COUNTRY FILE.
 
  Eric