FM> In the meantime, Rod Speed raised a point something about it not being
FM> the originator of the message which adds the tear and origin lines. What
FM> sort of software is this? Examples? How does it know who the originator
FM> is? Is that what he was saying anyway, if you saw his message?

FM> If I understand it correctly (and I'm not sure I do),

You dont.

FM> the point he was trying to make doesn't
FM> affect the discussion one way or the other,

It does.

You claimed that the EOT was completely pointless because, if
the message originator was choosing to add an EOT, it could
just as easily add a perfect tearline/originline pair instead.

Thats only true if the message originator does actually add the
tearline/originline. In some circumstances it does not, thats left
for some other software to do, so you cant just proclaim what *IT*
should be doing, either by design or by config. So it does make
considerable sense to have the EOT, which is very clear and
totally unambigiously delimiting the end of the user text.

Quite apart from anything else, the concept of bracketing the
user text with an SOT/EOT pair is itself a rather simpler and
more elegant design than say having the SOT which you admit is
necessary, and a rather more messy delimiting of the end of the
user text. Messy in the sense of easy of working out where the
user text ends and the trailing non user text starts.

For example, when a message reader is trying to work out what is
the user text, to say quote it before its handed to the external
editor when the user is replying to that message, its a hell of a
lot simple to detect the SOT, scan for the EOT, and whats between
it is passed to the external editor. More farting around is involve
with identifying the end of the user text even if you do assume a
legal tearline/origin line end of the message. The code is just
simpler and quicker identifying where the user text ends with an EOT.
@EOT:

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