509?? (Re: Max line length)

[William E. Davidsen Jr]

In article <2285 at buengc.BU.EDU> bph at buengc.bu.edu (Blair P. Houghton) writes:

| Do X3J11 do their discussing ain between trips to the 7-11 to buy
| lottery tickets or something?
| 
| Did they hit the trifecta at Rosemont betting 5-0-9? (probably required
| themselves to box...:-)

  Think about it... 512 is a power of two. If you want to keep the line
length in BCD you need three bytes for that. That leaves 509 for the
actual data. Identifiers are 31 characters to leave one byte for length,
flags, or whatever.

  Note that the standard does not require that the length be kept in
BCD, you could keep it in binary in two bytes and use a zero terminated
string. You could even keep the length in standard metric hexadecimal,
because it's implementation dependent.

  This answer is at least as serious as the question...
-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu at ge-crd.arpa)
  {uunet | philabs}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me