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From: peter@taronga.com (Peter da Silva)
Message-Id: <199509212226.RAA03428@bonkers.taronga.com>
Subject: Re: Policy on printf format specifiers?
To: terry@lambert.org (Terry Lambert)
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 1995 17:26:59 -0500 (CDT)
Cc: peter@taronga.com, terry@lambert.org
In-Reply-To: <199509211755.KAA08994@phaeton.artisoft.com> from "Terry Lambert" at Sep 21, 95 10:55:43 am
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> Records must do one of three things with Runic encoding schemes:

> 1)	Not contain a fixed amount of data for a fixed length field.

This is acceptable, and doesn't lose information.

> 2)	Be larger than they have to be to take runic expansion into
> 	account for fixed length fields, with a high average wastage.

This is acceptable, and doesn't lose information. The wastage is at worst
no worse than the wastage from using wide characters, since you can use
whatever wide character encoding you consider preferable to runic encoding
in your fixed record files. There is no third option to wide character
and runic encoding.

> 3)	Be variable length, giving up the relationship between file
> 	size and record count.

This is acceptable. Fixed record files are extremely rare in UNIX anyway.

 4)	Be wide enough to hold the characters in fixed width encoding,
	but use runic encoding when possible, and thus gain the advantages
	of both.