Carl Ellison writes:
If you're going to change the mapping, you might also drop the characters
"O" and "l", add two more, and thus make the character set more usable by
people who want to have public keys printed on business cards and therefore
copied by hand into a computer.
That change may be too disruptive and controversial. The change I
propose is about as tiny as you could possibly make, and thus should be
less controversial. It cracks open the can of worms with a crack too
small for any worms to get out. Your idea may be a good one in principle,
but there would certainly be a worm stampede.
On the other hand, there's an argument for not making any changes. PEM
appears to be suffering from a time-to-market problem as it is. At least,
I've heard an occasional impassioned plea for it to have been solid and
implemented already.
Yes, I know. But this is SUCH a TINY change, it shouldn't be disruptive
enough to be felt, and it pays off well. A lot of bang for the buck,
with no escaped worms, if everyone keeps their heads.
BTW-- I had a typo in my proposal. The sentence that reads:
... And like the radix-16 set, left
substrings could be used for any radix less than 16.
Should read:
... And like the radix-16 set, left
substrings could be used for any radix less than 64.