From: sdw@meaddata.com (Stephen Williams)
Date: Fri, 25 Feb 94 13:00:17 PST
To: warlord@MIT.EDU (Derek Atkins)
Subject: Re: your mail
In-Reply-To: <9402252055.AA17995@toxicwaste.media.mit.edu>
Message-ID: <9402252100.AA21777@jungle.meaddata.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


> 
> > Although I'm still uncomfortable about the non-crypto user key, there is
> > a simple solution to the problem of executable/data transmission:
> > 
> > Send it as Perl, Postscript, Tcl, whatever.
> 
> You are assuming that I (I being every possible recipient) have PERL
> available!  While in my particular case this is probably not a bad
> assumption, it is a horrible assumption in the long-run.  What about
> people with their 20M IBM PC-XT DOS machines?  They probably don't
> have PERL.  And I *know* that most Mac users do not have PERL.

All of those will run perl and it is much more readily available.
For most Unix systems, Perl is there by default.  (If the sysadmin 
does much.)

It is an improvement over MSDOS executables.

> Just use PGP.  Remember, PERL is the wrong solution to every problem. ;-)

Could be.  I'm not a Perl expert yet, but I'm working on adding it to
my multitude of languages.

> -derek

sdw
-- 
Stephen D. Williams  Local Internet Gateway Co.; SDW Systems 513 496-5223APager
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