Subject: How safe is a character

From: "Stephen G. Simpson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 7 Feb 91 14:27:34 -0500

Concerning the problem of ASCII files being damaged by e-mail
transmission via non-ASCII computers, Yawei writes:

> There's a difference between uuencoded and 'zW' (pure GB)
> texts in terms of the "amount of damage" that they can substain:
>
> - 'zW' (pure GB):  very tolerate. If a character is changed by
>  the mail system, only one corresponding Chinese character is
>  changed. One can still guess the meaning of the sentence from
>  context.
>
> - uuencode: depends. Sometimes the program would refuse to decode
>  it altogether, in which case the encoded text is useless. Other
>  times the decoding succeeds, but the damage seem quite extensive
>  - affects more than one Chinese characters.

Yes, thank you for pointing out my mistake.  I should have made it
clear that, while neither is perfect, CCDOS + UUENCODE is much worse
than pure GuoBiao (or ZW, or HZ) in terms of damage by non-ASCII
mailers.

> Exactly what coding scheme to use depends a lot on one's objective.
> But I think its not a good idea to design an encoding scheme around
> some software bugs - it's a case of confusing the ends and the means,
> I think.

I agree.  ASCII is an extremely well-established standard.  We
shouldn't contort ourselves merely to accommodate bugs in IBM's
EBCDIC-to-ASCII conversion programs.  In the present context, this
means we shouldn't propose XXencode as a standard for Chinese e-mail.
On the other hand, UUencoded files can become completely
unrecoverable.  So some kind of pure GuoBiao (or ZW or HZ) is a good
compromise.