On Sat, 16 Mar 2002 22:20:56 EST, Keith Moore said: > it would be quite reasonable for applications that already had a > deeply-wired assumption that character strings were in EBCDIC. > Which is why on BITNET and related networks, the applications > generally exchanged data in EBCDIC even between ASCII-native hosts. Damn you Keith. I had *almost* managed to repress the joyful memories of trying to debug what happened when a document managed to start off life as ASCII, get translated to EBCDIC for Bitnet, to/from ASCII again for an intermediate hop, back to EBCDIC again for another hop, and then back to ASCII at the tail end of the journey. And yes, that translate count is correct, and that document was... umm... interesting. ;) However, the day-to-day joys of Bitnet ASCII-EBCDIC translation and what it did to uuencode was one of the *primary* motivating reasons why Base64 happened instead of uuencode. Let's not lose sight of that debacle. ;) -- Valdis Kletnieks Computer Systems Senior Engineer Virginia Tech
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