Ah, that makes sense. I mis-read it to mean that SCALAR will be the same size as the message received. Although, your explanation makes much more sense than my interperetation.

When I wrote about dynamically increasing length I wasn't terribly clear. Sorry.

What I really should have asked is: Should I set my LENGTH quite high to provide for future capabilities, or should I, instead, make sure that I size LENGTH appropriately now and determine an effective protocol to use that is verbose enough to deal with anything I can throw at it?

In retrospect it's a silly question and I should go with the latter of the two solutions: settle on a specific size of message to accept and write code accordingly.

Thanks, ++Robartes.