Eric, I  noticed that  you responded  to Craig A.  Summerhill at  around 4:00
Sunday  morning. Your  comments were  very coherent  despite the  early hour.
You must be a either a workahaulic or an amnesiac.
 
As a result of this talk about  Listserv being available on non-VM systems, I
am  very curious  to see  the Unix  version. I  wonder if  there will  be any
advantage to running  Listserv on a Unix  box rather than VM for  those of us
who have both platforms  at hand. I suspect the Unix  version will be faster,
but I think a possible kink in your plans might be a result of doing the code
in  Pascal. Don't  get  me  wrong, Pascal's  one  of  my favorite  languages,
however, if the Pascal you're using is like the one on the big Unix box here,
it is strictly  a standard implementation. Features notably  missing from the
Unix Pascal compiler here are  formatted output and string manipulation which
are available  on VM's rendition of  Pascal even though they  may not compile
efficiently. Features such  as these are also available on  most C compilers.
Since a key idea behind your Listserv is  to make it portable, it seems to me
that C  would be  a more robust  compiler on more  platforms than  Pascal is.
 
I have  one more question.  I am sorry  if its too soon  to ask this.  If so,
just ignore this  question. Being as though Temple is  a backbone Listserver,
what will the impact of the rest of  the Listservers be if we were to migrate
our VM Listserv to  the new Unix one assuming it will run  on one of our Unix
systems? Note that our  VM system is on both BITnet and  The Internet. All of
our Unix systems are only on the Internet and I doubt I would ever be able to
justify getting them on BITnet too.
 
Stan Horwitz, Consultant    | Bitnet           | Internet
Temple University           | V4039@TEMPLEVM   | [log in to unmask]