Subject: re:which one is better

From: Dorothy Day <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 7 Feb 91 14:19:00 EST

Stephen Simpson writes:

>Well, not completely safe, because even some of the printable ASCII
>characters (33 to 126) are not handled correctly in EBCDIC.  This
>implies that your file can get corrupted if your mail path goes
>through an IBM mainframe running VM.  Fortunately, Internet mail is
>not usually gatewayed through IBM mainframes.

Actually, a great deal of Bitnet mail passes through IBM mainframes,
and for this reason some encoding (UUencoding or XXencoding usually
works) is necessary to protect non-text files.
        --Dorothy Day

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From: "Stephen G. Simpson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 7 Feb 91 16:06:18 -0500

> works) is necessary to protect non-text files.

I'm willing to believe that XXencoding usually works (at the cost of
making your files bigger by half).  But UUencoding usually doesn't
work, since it is not immune from the disease called EBCDIC.  (See
Yawei's recent message on "how safe is a character".)  That is the
reason for the existence of XXencode and similar workarounds.

Actually, there are some versions of UUencode that take account of
EBCDIC translation bugs, but the situation is complex. This is one
reason why people with Bitnet access but no Internet access often feel
deprived and harrassed.

UUencoding works fine for its intended purpose, namely to encode
non-ASCII files into printable ASCII.  Unfortunately, IBM mainframes
do not understand printable ASCII.