🚀 go-pugleaf

les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) writes:
...
>Then wouldn't it have been a good idea to make ^D equivalent to white
>space in postscript so the same data stream would work everywhere?

That's easy enough:
	(\004) cvn {} def
There's a good chance you'll even find this already present in userdict in
your printer...since there's not much else useful to be done with a ^D if
it manages to wander all the way down to the interpreter.  This is not
because it's the "Right Thing", but because the interpreter is being not
only correct, but helpful.  Similarly, you might find a definition like the
one above for 032 (^Z)...because DOSland thinks end-of-file is a character,
so the misbegotten ^Z's find their ways into various bizarre places.

It's still a particularly bad idea to *start* a file with ^D.

>...Instead we now have to make
>the application aware of how the data is going to be transmitted to the
>device in order to accomodate the most likely case where the application
>must supply the ^D...

When you take an application program--which here is intending to generate
a unit of PostScript output--and expect it to deal directly with the
interface to the device, including the boundaries between units of output
generated by different applications, you've got a problem.  Inevitably
there will be some rough edges, especially if (as in this case) the source
of the real problem (DOS) has to be considered immutable.  It helps if
everyone can bend a little--get the problem fixed--without losing sight of
where the problem is and how it should have been solved.

Les has contended that most PostScript printers are attached to DOS boxes.
I doubt it; I suspect more are on Macs...but that would be an interesting
question to answer.  Be that as it may, I hope you're arguing as strongly
over in a DOS newsgroup for them to get their act together on handling
printers.
-- 
Dick Dunn    rcd@raven.eklektix.com   -or-   raven!rcd    Boulder, Colorado
	...Simpler is better.