bugs in /bin/mail - not this time

[Daniel R. Levy]

In article <755 at mtune.UUCP>, jhc at mtune.UUCP (Jonathan Clark) writes:
>In article <3000002 at cdp> scott at cdp.UUCP writes:
>>How can you send binaries in mail.
>You can't. That's why uucp(1) and uuto(1) were invented. Encoding is
>cheating.
>You could if /bin/mail supported a logical separation between a letter
>and its envelope. As I know nothing about X.400 except that it weighs
>more than I care to read, and very little about other mail delivery
>systems, let me ask a possibly stupid question: do any other mail
>subsystems support this separation so that binaries could be mailed?
>Jonathan Clark
>[NAC,attmail]!mtune!jhc
>My walk has become rather more silly lately.

I'd like to pose yet another issue to feed the fire:  how would one implement
mailing "binaries" on, to, or from systems where, instead of the sensible Unix
paradigm of a data file being a continuous stream of bytes, there are about a
jillion different file formats, all record-based?  I'm talking in particular
about our old friend VMS.  One would not only have to send the raw data
itself but also supplementary data about record boundaries, record attributes,
file attributes... etc.  This would seem to call for a "neutral" exchange
format, if such were even possible.
-- 
 -------------------------------    Disclaimer:  The views contained herein are
|       dan levy | yvel nad      |  my own and are not at all those of my em-
|         an engihacker @        |  ployer or the administrator of any computer
| at&t computer systems division |  upon which I may hack.
|        skokie, illinois        |
 --------------------------------   Path: ..!{akgua,homxb,ihnp4,ltuxa,mvuxa,
	   go for it!  			allegra,ulysses,vax135}!ttrdc!levy