Do we have any old globalview or viewpoint files that can be used to test the code for reading XCCS files?

3 views
Skip to first unread message

Ron Kaplan

unread,
Apr 8, 2026, 3:53:01 PM (9 days ago) Apr 8
to Medley Interlisp core
I want to simplify Tedit so we don't have to maintain the extra code for interpreting the XCCS/MCCS stringlets of non-charset 0 runcoded characters, and to deal with that only in the plain-text file-opening code. It would be good to have a known valid XCCS source to test on.

Nick Briggs

unread,
Apr 8, 2026, 4:34:34 PM (9 days ago) Apr 8
to Ron Kaplan, Lisp Core


On Apr 8, 2026, at 12:52, Ron Kaplan <ron.k...@post.harvard.edu> wrote:

I want to simplify Tedit so we don't have to maintain the extra code for interpreting the XCCS/MCCS stringlets of non-charset 0 runcoded characters, and to deal with that only in the plain-text file-opening code.  It would be good to have a known valid XCCS source to test on.


I think I know where to get some, perhaps --



You should be able to (double-click) open the .iso image and poke around.

There are sample documents (and fonts) -- but there's no guarantee that any given GlobalView file is stringlet encoded.  I thought they did the same thing that Word did, and they dumped the heap where they'd built the document so data within a chunk of memory may contain stringlet encoded data but finding it isn't really an option.

-- Nick

Herb Jellinek

unread,
Apr 8, 2026, 5:44:15 PM (9 days ago) Apr 8
to Nick Briggs, Ron Kaplan, Lisp Core
Is there a GlobalView emulator around to use to create some test documents?

Maybe there's a Tajo/XDE emulator, too, with suitable tools?

                Herb
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Medley Interlisp core" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lispcore+u...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/lispcore/90F88E55-D207-4C9F-BDA9-D8AF887557C8%40gmail.com.

Nick Briggs

unread,
Apr 8, 2026, 5:55:13 PM (9 days ago) Apr 8
to Herb Jellinek, Ron Kaplan, Lisp Core

Larry Masinter

unread,
Apr 9, 2026, 12:24:13 PM (8 days ago) Apr 9
to Nick Briggs, Herb Jellinek, Ron Kaplan, Lisp Core
i don't think Star had a text/plain format, or that the plain text access from clearinghouse using the GAP Gateway Access Protocol handled characters outside of 7-bit ascii.

there might have been some email gateway transition for email from Fuji Xerox to / from Internet email but it seems likely that the transition is ideosyncratic to the email gateway.
--


To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/lispcore/846692FF-8810-4012-A079-53745942FEAC%40gmail.com.

Nick Briggs

unread,
Apr 9, 2026, 1:14:28 PM (8 days ago) Apr 9
to masinter, Herb Jellinek, Ron Kaplan, Lisp Core
I suspect we're not going to find any Viewpoint/Globalview files that are pure stringlet-encoded from beginning to end -- but lots of things should have stringlet encoding in pieces.  Interpress masters, for example, should have such text strings.

Did Cedar convert to using the run-coded stringlet encoding? For source files? Mesa source files would also presumably support stringlet encoding, but not sure what form.

On Apr 9, 2026, at 09:23, Larry Masinter <L...@acm.org> wrote:

i don't think Star had a text/plain format, or that the plain text access from clearinghouse using the GAP Gateway Access Protocol handled characters outside of 7-bit ascii.

GAP was pretending to be an ASCII terminal, so nothing of interest there.


there might have been some email gateway transition for email from Fuji Xerox to / from Internet email but it seems likely that the transition is ideosyncratic to the email gateway.

Bill van Melle wrote the XNS interface for the XNS/SMTP gateway (in C).  I handled the handoff from that into/out of SMTP.  I don't remember what happened with characters outside ASCII in the text body, but attachments were passed through as a printable format so that they survived a roundtrip as a valid object.

A message body that comes through XNS mail is stringlet encoded - but it would depend on what created it whether it used a subset of the stringlet encoding.

We shouldn't break the XNS network operations by breaking any stringlet processing outside of TEdit.

On Wed, Apr 8, 2026 at 2:55 PM Nick Briggs <nicholas...@gmail.com> wrote:

from our friend devhawala

-- Nick


On Apr 8, 2026, at 14:44, Herb Jellinek <jell...@newscenter.com> wrote:

Is there a GlobalView emulator around to use to create some test documents?

Maybe there's a Tajo/XDE emulator, too, with suitable tools?

                Herb

On 4/8/26 1:34 PM, Nick Briggs wrote:


On Apr 8, 2026, at 12:52, Ron Kaplan <ron.k...@post.harvard.edu> wrote:

I want to simplify Tedit so we don't have to maintain the extra code for interpreting the XCCS/MCCS stringlets of non-charset 0 runcoded characters, and to deal with that only in the plain-text file-opening code.  It would be good to have a known valid XCCS source to test on.


I think I know where to get some, perhaps --



You should be able to (double-click) open the .iso image and poke around.

There are sample documents (and fonts) -- but there's no guarantee that any given GlobalView file is stringlet encoded.  I thought they did the same thing that Word did, and they dumped the heap where they'd built the document so data within a chunk of memory may contain stringlet encoded data but finding it isn't really an option.

-- Nick

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Medley Interlisp core" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lispcore+u...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/lispcore/90F88E55-D207-4C9F-BDA9-D8AF887557C8%40gmail.com.


Larry Masinter

unread,
Apr 9, 2026, 5:03:05 PM (8 days ago) Apr 9
to Nick Briggs, masinter, Herb Jellinek, Ron Kaplan, Lisp Core
at the time and until much more recently, source code for most programming langanguages were restricted to a limited set -- usually ASCII or EBCDIC. I think it's only the nature of Lisp which explicitly treats programs as data that wider charset support was added. So I wouldn't expect any XCCS samples in the Tahoe / Globalview / Mesa / Cedar sources.



To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/lispcore/9AF37420-7D50-4109-B65B-50598D7F405F%40gmail.com.

Ron Kaplan

unread,
Apr 10, 2026, 4:31:32 AM (7 days ago) Apr 10
to Larry Masinter, Nick Briggs, Herb Jellinek, Lisp Core
I poked around in the XSOFT files that Nick sent, I didn't see anything that looked like documentation files.

So I think I'll just continue to use my old test files.

Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages