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From: wls@astrovax.UUCP (William L. Sebok)
Newsgroups: net.news,net.micro.mac,net.news.group
Subject: Re: Cleaning up net.sources.mac (mod.sources...)
Message-ID: <689@astrovax.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 22-Nov-85 02:33:41 EST
Article-I.D.: astrovax.689
Posted: Fri Nov 22 02:33:41 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 23-Nov-85 06:12:26 EST
References: <482@spice.cs.cmu.edu>
Reply-To: wls@astrovax.UUCP (William L. Sebok)
Organization: Princeton Univ. Astrophysics
Lines: 19
Xref: watmath net.news:4403 net.micro.mac:3541 net.news.group:4657

>> I don't understand this.  What is the importance of uuencode in the
>> discussion.  Binhex is used for the mac, and an excellent decoder of
>> binhex was posted to the net. (xbin). In source.
>
> It's not very important... but it *is* supposed to be the standard binary
> transfer program for mail and news. It's not that big a deal, though I would
> prefer to be able to do *something* with this code.

The utilities btoa / atob recently distributed in mod.sources with compress
4.0 produce more efficient encoding than uuencode / uudecode, using 85 of the
printable characters rather than 64.  I hope that these programs begin to
displace uuencode/uudecode and begin to be more universally available at sites
to which I might want to send things.

And, of course, the combination of compress and btoa is hard to beat for
sending text (and often even for binaries).
-- 
Bill Sebok			Princeton University, Astrophysics
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