Re: Greetings and comments on MCP 2.1

[Michael Brundage <brundage@piaf.ipac.caltech.edu>]

On 7 Aug 1997, John D. Ramsdell wrote:
> This odd passage seems to be another instance of the standard using
> the word message for two different concepts.  I urge we adopt the
> following language.  Let's define a message line to be the basic unit
> of MCP communication.  Messages lines are single lines of printable
> ASCII terminated by a network newline and prefixed with the string
> "#$#".

Sounds good to me.

> Furthermore, let's define a message to be an ordered
> collection of message lines consisting of a start message line, the
> message lines for each multiline key-value pair declared in the start
> message line, and the #$#END message line for each multiline
> key-value pair declared in the start message line.

Except that this definition should also include single message lines as 
messages, right?  That is, a message is either a message line, or a 
multi-line message (which is defined to be a start message line, followed 
by any number of message lines, including an end message line for each 
multiline value indicated in the start message line).



michael