Xref: utzoo comp.sys.atari.st:8923 comp.sys.mac:14885
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!dalcs!aucs!870158a
From: 870158a@aucs.UUCP (Benjamin Armstrong)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st,comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: binHex in atari ST
Message-ID: <1038@aucs.UUCP>
Date: 7 Apr 88 23:15:29 GMT
References: <1537@alliant.Alliant.COM> <1505@water.waterloo.edu>
Reply-To: 870158a@aucs.UUCP (Benjamin Armstrong)
Organization: School of Computer Science, Acadia Univ., Nova Scotia
Lines: 24

In article <1505@water.waterloo.edu> ljdickey@water.waterloo.edu (Lee Dickey) writes:
>BinHex is an easy enough program to write.
>Each OCTET ( 8 bit byte ) of the binary file is split into two nibbles,
>4 bits each.  Each nibble is used as a pointer to index into the vector
>"0123456789ABCDEF" with 16 elements.
>On the other hand, the UUencode program does an encoding that takes
>each set of three octets (24 bits) and produces 4 printable characters,
>by a rule that uses each set of 6 bits to index into a vector string
>with 64 elements.

If we are talking about the BinHex I'm familiar with (BinHex 4.0) the
encoding scheme looks more like what you have described as "UUencode" than
what you call "BinHex".  Despite the misleading name, BinHex 4.0 does not
encode binary files with the above hex encoding scheme.  Take a look at
one of the files in comp.binaries.mac for yourself.  The code uses a
subset of printable characters which looks like it may consist of 64
elements.

Does BinHex 4.0 use the UUencode encoding rule?
-- 
          Benjamin Armstrong at Acadia University, Wolfville N.S.
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