Command Message Formats

Each site should establish its now conventions about when to send a monitor command string, and in what size chunks. When performing a routine operation, one might want to send several command lines as a single message. If working with the monitor as usual, a reasonable break point might be at every carriage return. When using a highly interactive language such as QED, one might decide character-by-character transmission was a necessity. We feel that each user should have the choice between these three methods (and possible more). Furthermore, the user should be able to change between each mode at will. The differences in syntax of the send-message commands mentioned above should be noted. For the first, a special send-message command character must be defined, and it should not be sent along with the message. For the second, the carriage return acts dually as the send-message command and as a command delimiter. Therefore it must be sent with the message. Finally, the case of character-by-character transmission with its implicit send command should pose no significant problems.

The preceding discussion is meant to imply also that the receiver must be able to buffer up each of the above types of transmission into a form acceptable to its own monitor interface.

In addition, all echoing should be done in the local host, with the foreign machine suppressing its echoes (if it can.)

We would like to thank Carl Ellison (of Utah) for his valuable suggestions and criticisms of this work, and Jim Curry (of Utah) for his encouragement and support of the effort.

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Note: This RFC was put into machine readable form for entry into the online RFC archives by Jon Ribbens 7/97.