Yes, Shmuel really meant "a line comprising EXACTLY hyphen, hyphen, space, newline". That's the standard (if rarely understood) start of a signature, which compliant MUAs will strip when quoting.
While I like this standard and use it, I fear that it's fading away. -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> On Behalf Of Radoslaw Skorupka Sent: Sunday, January 19, 2025 9:05 AM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: File transfer question It really depends on the text and its purpose. IMHO "Internet e-mail" means anything you can imagine. And it is very rare to transfer it from mainframe to PC. However for most people "e-mail" is just a text. Or "word processor text" - I mean font size, bold, underline, font colour, font type, etc. But it is *NOT* a text. Word document is not a text. Not pure text. I have no idea where the "--" or "-- " can be found in an "e-mail". The only place I see is my signature. :-) And in this place remaining spaces are not important. We can drill the topic ad absurdum. Analyze hidden spaces (not X'20'), false "a" characters, UNICODE, etc. etc. But... who cares? When processing business data we have names and numbers. No remaining spaces. When transferring source code we don't care about remaining spaces. Where is the *real* case where remaining spaces do the difference? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
