Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!ucla-cs!valeria.cs.ucla.edu!wales From: wales@valeria.cs.ucla.edu (Rich Wales) Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d Subject: Re: Automated extraction of programs from c.b.i.p postings. Message-ID: <37392@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU> Date: 28 Jul 90 22:24:32 GMT References: <34590@ut-emx.UUCP> Sender: news@CS.UCLA.EDU Reply-To: wales@CS.UCLA.EDU (Rich Wales) Organization: UCLA CS Department, Los Angeles Lines: 38 In article <34590@ut-emx.UUCP> readdm@walt.cc.utexas.edu (David M. Read) discusses a new version of "uuencode" he has written, which is backwards compatible with the original "uuencode", but which also handles multi- part files. He feels there is no need to scrap "uuencode". I must disagree. One big problem with "uuencode" is that lots of people who read this and similar newsgroups get their feeds through machines which use the EBCDIC (IBM) character code. Translation between ASCII and EBCDIC, in the real world, frequently results in one-way munging of several of the special characters used by "uuencode" -- such as the square brackets, the curly braces, and the backslash. The result is that a "uuencode" file, once having gone through a defective ASCII/EBCDIC translation, is corrupted beyond repair. It isn't just a question of undoing the bad translation: if several different characters all get changed into question marks, you are stuck. Getting all affected machines to "fix" their ASCII/EBCDIC translation tables is a gargantuan task that has essentially been given up as hope- less. If we aren't willing to use something as completely different as Brad Templeton's ABE, we should at least change to "xxencode". "xxencode" is precisely the same as "uuencode", except that the 64 characters used to encode the file are taken from a set that is known to be immune to ASCII/EBCDIC mangling (specifically, "xxencode" uses upper and lower case letters, digits, and the plus and minus signs). It would be trivial to add an option to a "uuencode" clone to let it support "xxencode" as well -- since, as I said, the file structure is utterly identical except for the character code. -- -- Rich Wales // UCLA Computer Science Department 3531 Boelter Hall // Los Angeles, CA 90024-1596 // +1 (213) 825-5683 "Indeed! Twenty-four is the gateway to heroic salvation."