C source code to extract CP/M ARK archives?

[Antonio Carlini]

> If you can recognise what constitues a 'character' (trivial 
> on paper tape 
> or 9 track magtape, less obvious on bit-serial media like 
> floppy disks), 
> and if you assemy there will still be enough ASCII-encoded 
> text around 
> that some of it is in a normal human language, then the 
> problem seems to 
> reduce to solving a monoalphabetic substitution cipher, which is 
> generally not too hard....

I don't doubt that it's doable given the motivation, a
modicum of knowledge and some extant text. My point was
that it is hardly what I would call self-describing.
Right now ASCII is so deeply engrained into us all that
the idea that we might forget how it works seems utterly
ludicrous. A few hundred years from now that may change.

That's probably true of ordinary written language too
(every time I see examples of medieval text they look
quite "foreign" to me - difficul to make out the
individual letters because of the unfamiliar style).

So I guess I'm saying that PDF is not much worse than
ASCII in the absence of a specification. Given a 
speciication then it really is no worse (admittedly the
initial PDF reader implementation is likely to take
longer to create than the initial ASCII reader ...
but that's a one-off cost).

Antonio


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Antonio Carlini arcarlini at iee.org