23 May
2014
23 May
'14
10:27 a.m.
On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 10:07:21AM -0700, Chuck Guzis wrote:
It turns out that it requires the "unpadded"
TAP file. (I guess that's E11). Nothing like a standard...
It *so* almost was a standard. When I wrote up my format (which I stole
from, I think, MS FORTRAN V3.2's method of storing unformatted binary files),
I emphasized that the length longwords are NOT padded to an even boundary,
because I didn't want any confusion with .TPC (which was popular at the
time but makes backspacing needlessly difficult since it's not intended
for live use). And I guess someone somewhere kind of half-read that part
and thought I meant the opposite.
Luckily it doesn't matter in the 99% of cases (on PDP-11s anyway) where
the lengths are all even ... annoying the rest of the time though.
John Wilson
D Bit