Comments on "Proposed Remote Job Entry Protocol"

Chuck Holland's draft proposal (RFC #360) is an excellent document, very complete and consistent. Since the final standard RJE protocol will be widely used on the Network, honing its definition now will save trouble and discontent later. Therefore, I will proceed to make a new suggestions and pick a few nits. 1. In my humble opinion, the command verb "BYE" is overly cute; I would find "QUIT" much less offensive 2. The "(pathname)" syntax (p.5) may need some reworking. It would be very desirable for all protocols or Network access programs to use the same syntax for selecting a host and socket and/or file name. (Note that the FTP documents use the term "pathname" in the more restricted sense of a local file system name.) a. The PORT construction seems very undesirable, since it depends upon a particular bit convention of TIP's. TIP's have bent Network protocols rather badly in the past, but surely we don't want to build their particular socket system into an official protocol. b. For convenience, it may be desirable to allow hex and octal socket numbers. c. There will probably be other hosts besides TIP's which will use the "(host-socket)" pathname, and some of them may want a transmission attribute other than "T". The proposed syntax should be changed to allow (attributes) in (host-socket) d. I see no reason to exclude attribute "TE", since the control characters cr, lf, and ff exist in EBCDIC as well as ASCII. e. There are many EBCDIC codes, and at least 2 ASCII's. The (code) construction needs expansion.