Corruption of Some Binary Objects

One of the Newton 2.x OS Q&As
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This document was exported on 7/23/97.

Corruption of Some Binary Objects (5/13/96)

Q: Sometimes when I send a binary object (including a real) from the Newton device, it is corrupted when I read it with the FDILs on the desktop. What's going on?

A: When FDILs 1.0 receive a binary object, they must "guess" whether it is a string or not. This guessing algorithm has a flaw which can result in non-string binary objects being treated as strings, and thus the Unicode conversion process is performed on them, which results in corruption of the desktop binary object.

The easiest ways to avoid this problem are to either receive the data with the CDIL (in other words, don't include them in the frame), or else to ensure that either the first two or the last two bytes of the binary object are non-zero. This workaround will not be necessary in future versions of the DIL libraries.

Note: this has been fixed in the 1.0.2 Windows DILs.