On (08 Jul 02) Paul Williams wrote to All...

Hello Paul,

 PW> Hi All , hope you are having a nice day

Trying to. :-)

 PW>  Instead of a new one how about looking at an
 PW> old proposal I remember reading abt in a back
 PW> issue of fidonews. A binary list which among other
 PW> things used a bit field to represent flags such
 PW> as MO, CM, LO, PVT.

 PW>  Give each a 2^x position and add them up to get a
 PW> single value.

 PW>  0 0 0 0
 PW>  | | | +-MO
 PW>  | | +---CM
 PW>  | +-----LO
 PW>  +-------PVT

This would be fine. I wonder how my listing would translate??... or
were you just talking about the flags area? :)

 PW>  Now a system that's CM and PVT would be 1 0 1 0 or A in hexadecimal,
 PW> a CM and MO system is 3, and so on. Do the same thing for the various
 PW> modem and ip flags and you'd leave room for quite a bit of additional
 PW> information in the standard St Louis format. Simply run a preprocessor
 PW> on a nodelist w/ the above to reconstruct the full flags needed for
 PW> older software as well as to make any changes needed for pots only or
 PW> ion systems which don't need the info the other does.
 PW>  Just a thought. :>

I'm still learning a lot. I probably shouldn't be posting since I'm
not well versed in the tech area, but I have to learn somehow. :)

I'm wondering what exactly is wrong with the current Nodelist format
that requires a whole new format?

To me, in my non-tech mind, a comma delimited file is still valid. It
seems that no matter what is done, there will be a need for new
programs to parse, compile, handle or whatever needs to be done
to/with the new Nodelist. With this in mind, and I'm sure I'll be
corrected if I'm wrong;

One problem with the current Nodelist format seems to be the length of
entries. An entry that is too long will break some software? If that's
the case, then a program that will convert the entries to the required
length. This would allow for more length in the Nodelist. The extra
length could contain information on telnet, binkp and other
protocols/information needed in the Nodelist to handle current needs.

Ok. Everyone beat me up here. :-)


Regards,

 Frank

http://pages.sbcglobal.net/flv
http://biseonline.com/r19

--- PPoint 3.01