Nathaniel Borenstein 7 Nov 1991 15:34:43:
First of all, it vastly increases the set of transformations a
UA may have to understand in order to just restore data to its "native"
state.
Not necessarily. It is reasonable to build an implementation that
recognizes a set of transforamtions as either a no-op or as a single
transformation.
By opening up wider sets of transformations, it opens up much
wider problems of transformation definition (which uuencode? which
ccompress?) and potential interoperability problems.
Yes. precisely, what I am proposing a toolset which will let us have
the flexiiblity to encode all sort of interesting things we haven't
considered. I mention uuencode and lzw because they are out there
are are going to get used.
Second, it inflicts a UNIX paradigm (pipes) and, in the versions
presented, a set of UNIX transformations (uuencode, compress) on the
whole world including non-UNIX systems.
No. The UNIX "implementation" of this would be pipes, but I could
show you how to do it without pipes in a single process on PRIMOS.