Valdis Kletnieks wrote: >On Fri, 22 Mar 2002 00:30:37 GMT, "D. J. Bernstein" said: > >> Boy, I'm glad that, when you faced the much smaller problem of non-ASCII >> subject lines back in 1991, you and your buddies decided to ``maximize >> the rate'' of deployment by inventing your own encoding mechanisms, >> rather than giving in to the demands of 8-bit transparency. Oh, sure, we >you could *NOT* trust that all the systems >between here and there were 8-bit-clean (in fact, an 8-bit-clean system >was a rarity) In fact, in 1991, you couldn't even rely on them being 7-bit-clean. I remember exchanging mail with someone whose mail server kept changing ^ to ? for all messages he sent or received. (It came up because we were talking about Pascal. I was young, OK? :-) We eventually figured out that, although he had an Internet-style address, his mail gateway was connected via BITNET, which used EBCDIC. That's where base64 came from: it had to use characters that would be legal in all known systems. /=================================================================\ |John Stracke |Principal Engineer | |jstracke@incentivesystems.com |Incentive Systems, Inc. | |http://www.incentivesystems.com |My opinions are my own. | |=================================================================| |"And bring the search warrant." "You mean the sledgehammer, sir?"| |"Yes." | \=================================================================/