Read this if you're having trouble unpacking Tcl

[Tom Neff]

In article <1990Dec30.151724.20808 at zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> xanthian at zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) writes:
>All as unarguable as motherhood and apple pie. Now you go tell Joe or
>Suzie GreatSoftwareHacker that that spiffy 132 character wide terminal
>s/he bought to write code is such a hazard to the net that we _insist_
>s/he stop using the right 52 character positions so that _we_ aren't
>inconvenienced dealing with the free efforts of his/her skullsweat. 

They can use 700 columns if it makes them feel better, but when it comes
time to take something they've written and post it to Usenet, it's much
easier and more considerate for THEM to reformat it portably, ONCE, than
it is for thousands of cursing recipients to have to compensate for
their laziness after the fact.

Nor are UUENCODE-style subterfuges to preserve the precise original
bitstream through the netnews channel really a solution, since unless
the recipient's text architecture happens to match the author's, he has
TWO decode passes to try and make it through: one to undo the UUENCODE
and another to turn the decoded alien data into something he can
compile.  The hard work of the people behind the scenes who make this
second transformation happen transparently in his news gateway is thrown
away, of course, since UUENCODE deliverately denies the gateway access
to the real source text.

>If I
>were Kent GreatSoftwareHacker, I'd suggest you write the damn code
>yourself, if you can't cope with my coding style, or tolerate posting
>methods that will transport it.

Au contraire.  With all the source that's posted to the net every year,
a user can stuff his disk many times over JUST with what appears in
appropriate cleartext format.  When a huge glop of encoded gibberish
shows up in a "source" newsgroup, many people just sigh and 'K' it.  In
the Darwinian order of things, the cleartext will always tend to
prevail.  As someone else has pointed out, it is Netnews whose text
format interoperability should be improved, transparently to the user,
rather than promulgating egregious hacks at the expense of news
readability.