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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!rutgers!andromeda!argus!ken
From: ken@argus.UUCP (Kenneth Ng)
Newsgroups: net.micro,net.micro.atari16
Subject: Re: New way to post binaries
Message-ID: <543@argus.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 24-Oct-86 20:52:03 EDT
Article-I.D.: argus.543
Posted: Fri Oct 24 20:52:03 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 25-Oct-86 06:55:43 EDT
References: <2035@dalcs.UUCP>
Distribution: net
Organization: NJ Inst of Tech., Newark NJ
Lines: 29
Xref: watmath net.micro:15819 net.micro.atari16:2786

In article <2035@dalcs.UUCP>, silvert@dalcs.UUCP (Bill Silvert) writes:
> Here are some opinions about the problem of posting binaries, along with
> a draft solution.  There should be some discussion on the net before it
> gets implemented.
> 
> Binaries have to be encoded as ASCII files.  But there is no reason why
> we have to use uuencode!  There are evidently problems with it, and we
> should feel free to invent an alternate encoding method which avoids the
> problems with uuencode.  These problems, aside from the minor one that
> uuencode is designed for th Unix environment, are that some characters
> (such as curly braces {}) do not make it through all nodes unscathed
> (IBM machines and others with EBCDIC codes appear to be the culprits),
> and for long files the posting have to be combined in an editor.

The problem is square brackets, which do not exist in EBCDIC in any
standard form.  This becomes a real pain even with source programs
written in C and Pascal.

-- 
Kenneth Ng: Post office: NJIT - CCCC, Newark New Jersey  07102
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