Date   : Sat, 06 Jun 1987 0132:00
From   : w_smith%wookie.DEC@decwrl.dec.com (Willie Smith, LTN Components Eng.)
Subject: Z-80 assembly UUDECODE is (sort of) done.

I just (moments ago) finished the Z-80 assembly version of
UUDECODE.  Thanks to all those who sent me mail, I was unable to
reply due to problems finding paths back to you.  A few questions
still remain however:
 
1)     What on earth is the 'mode' number?  That's the number that shows
       up between "begin" and the filename on the header line of a
       UUENCODEd file.  I'm just ignoring it, is that safe?
 
2)     The Eunichs online 'manual' claims that "the body is terminated
       by a line with a count of zero.  This line consists of one
       ASCII space."  However, the UUENCODE I got from SIMTEL20 does
       not conform to this, but rather sticks a "`" (60H) into the file,
       which being an out of band character, I guess is supposed to
       signal something.  Which is right?  I'm currently calling it an
       error and closing the file properly (which works), but this makes
       me nervous....
 
3)     The online 'manual' says that each line can be up to 62 characters
       long, including the trailing newline.  What is meant by 'newline'?
       Is it CR, or LF, or both, or what?
 
4)     Is there a real honest-to-gloz protocol definition out there
       somewhere that someone could send me?  Please don't tell me
       to RTFM, the nearest Eunichs machine is miles away, and I can
       only talk to it thru our network.
 
5)     I find that my program tends to stick on a final sector full of
       NULL bytes.  This causes strange things to happen with CRC
       checking.  How can I get the total byte count of the output
       file by looking at the UUENCODEd file?  I suspect that this
       may go away when I figure out what the 'right' way of terminating
       the file is.
 
Teaser:        Once I get all this info together, I can write the encoder and 
       submit them both to SIMTEL20.  The decoder seems to run
       about 7 times as fast as the PASCAL version that's floating
       around [your milage may vary, I have a hard disk cache...].
       The size of the decoder executable is 3.125 K bytes, less than
       one third the size of the PASCAL version.  Anyone want to be a
       Beta test site?
 
Willie Smith
w_smith@wookie.dec.com
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