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Re: Base-64 proposal

To: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Subject: Re: Base-64 proposal
From: George Michaelson <ggm@connect.com.au>
Date: Thu, 17 Apr 1997 11:09:34 +1000
Cc: rivest@theory.lcs.mit.edu (Ron Rivest), spki@c2.net
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 16 Apr 1997 07:53:22 MST." <3.0.1.32.19970416075322.00632e80@popd.ix.netcom.com>
Sender: owner-spki@c2.net



I was going to propose {{ and }} as notation for brace in 8-bit streams
but realized 

	(1) that }} was unneccessary since you can't be in a state
	    to see a '}' unless there is no '{' to trigger you into 6-bit

	(2) {{ requires a 1-byte lookahead and thus a special case hack
	    in the input parser where {eg} doesn't since the desired char
	    is recognized by the 6-bit parse code which is required anyway.

One could say that {eg} imposes a 3 byte overhead where {{ imposes a 1 byte
penalty, but in the context of the frequency of { in the 8-bit datastream
this is unlikely to be a major cost. Mind you, dropping into a 6-bit parse
when just getting one more char and if its another { dropping one in the
stream is probably less codework. I beg off considering what {<crlf>{ and 
other pathalogical forms mean.

Whatever.

	-George

References:

Re: Base-64 proposal

From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>

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