Valdis Kletnieks wrote:
On Fri, 22 Mar 2002 00:30:37 GMT, "D. J. Bernstein" said:
Boy, I'm glad that, when you faced the much smaller problem of
non-ASCII
subject lines back in 1991, you and your buddies decided to ``maximize
the rate'' of deployment by inventing your own encoding mechanisms,
rather than giving in to the demands of 8-bit transparency. Oh, sure,
we
you could *NOT* trust that all the systems
between here and there were 8-bit-clean (in fact, an 8-bit-clean system
was a rarity)
In fact, in 1991, you couldn't even rely on them being 7-bit-clean. I
remember exchanging mail with someone whose mail server kept changing ^ to
? for all messages he sent or received. (It came up because we were
talking about Pascal. I was young, OK? :-) We eventually figured out
that, although he had an Internet-style address, his mail gateway was
connected via BITNET, which used EBCDIC. That's where base64 came from:
it had to use characters that would be legal in all known systems.
/=================================================================\
|John Stracke |Principal Engineer |
|jstracke(_at_)incentivesystems(_dot_)com |Incentive Systems, Inc. |
|http://www.incentivesystems.com |My opinions are my own. |
|=================================================================|
|"And bring the search warrant." "You mean the sledgehammer, sir?"|
|"Yes." |
\=================================================================/