I have read most of these posts with a mixture of sadness and amusement. 
Sadness because people get so upset over something like this and amusement for 
the same reason.

 

Starting from the begging, I open my text editor and type in my text. I save it 
and magically an EOF character is appended to the end of the file. I did not 
ask for it to be there, there was no dialog box or warning that it was going to 
happen. It is an artifact of how the system work. When I open that text file, I 
only see my text, the EOF has been stripped from my file. Again, it is how the 
system is designed work.

 

Making system A talk to system B is all about data manipulation. After all they 
are two different beasts with different expectations and so the program that is 
designed to communicate between them should seamlessly and silently handle 
these differences for the user. 

 

For example, an EOF is a valid character on system A but not on system B so if 
reading a file on A and sending to B I would not send the EOF. I might replace 
it instead with what system B expects to mark the EOF (which if my faulty early 
morning memory serves, if you are using a terminal program to transfer a file 
you have to hit CTRL-C, or something, to let the Model T know the EOF has been 
reached. In effect you are mapping control characters form system A to system B.

 

Years ago, I wrote a program to drip-feed GCode to a CNC machine whose 
controller had some particular requirements in both the data itself and 
handshaking. So, I read in a text file and ‘manipulated’ the data so it could 
be sent to the controller without incident. There were no check boxes to not 
‘manipulate’ the data as that was one of the main purposes of the program and 
to not do so meant most likely locking up the CNC controller whilst cutting a 
part, which is BAD.

 

Carrying an ideal like “don’t manipulate the data” past any sort of logical 
consideration is encroaching on the border of zealotry. 

 

Jeff_Birt

 

From: M100 <[email protected]> On Behalf Of John R. Hogerhuis
Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2019 1:14 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [M100] Weird "bug" with TS-DOS 4.0 (ROM version)

 

"That places the obligation on the wrong party."

It's not a legal issue. It's just functionality.

Arguing on other turf (FTP, or checksum algorithms, etc) is to totally ignore 
the issue.

But really, you're arguing on the basis of principle that I agree with in 
principle, but in real life an engineer weighs the issues and can set ANY 
principle aside. 
Yes my decision will violate your assumptions in a hypothetical scenario. I 
guess.



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