Josiah Carlson wrote: > The standard high-bit-density encoding past base-64 is base-85 > (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascii85), which encodes 4 binary bytes > as 5 ascii bytes, versus 3 binary bytes as 4 ascii bytes. It works, > is an RFC somewhere,
RFC 1924, published on April 1, 1996, to shorten the representation of IPv6 addresses, so that you can write ssh '4)+k&C#VzJ4br>0wv%Yp' instead of having to write ssh 1080:0:0:0:8:800:200C:417A Most notably, section 7 (implementation issues) points out Many current processors do not find 128 bit integer arithmetic, as required for this technique, a trivial operation. This is not considered a serious drawback in the representation, but a flaw of the processor designs. For arbitrary-sized data, you'd have to give up 128-bit arithmetic, of course, and represent the input data to encode as a long integer. Regards, Martin P.S. Just in case it isn't clear: I would oppose any specific proposal to add this Ascii85 algorithm to the standard library. It would sound like we don't have any real problems to solve. _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
