On Sat, Aug 2, 2008 at 10:37 AM, Josiah Carlson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Sat, Aug 2, 2008 at 10:09 AM, "Martin v. Löwis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> 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.
Same here. > Original intent (encoding IPV6 addresses) != current usefulness (a > more efficient ascii encoding of binary data). That was an April Fool's RFC. -- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/) _______________________________________________ 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