On 6/24/2010 4:59 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:
But I wouldn't go so far as to claim that interpreting the protocols
as text is wrong. After all we're talking exclusively about protocols
that are designed intentionally to be directly "human readable"
I agree that the claim "':' is just a byte" is a bit shortsighted.
If the designers of the protocols had intended to use uninterpreted
bytes as protocol markers, they could and I suspect would have used
unused control codes, of which there are several. Then there would have
been no need for escape mechanisms to put things like :<> into content text.
I am very sure that the reason for specifying *ascii* byte values was to
be crysal clear as to what *character* was meant and to *exclude* use on
the internet of the main imcompatible competitor encoding -- IBM's
EBCDIC -- which IBM used in all of *its* networks. Until the IBM PC came
out in the early 1980s (and IBM originally saw that as a minor sideline
and something of a toy), there was a battle over byte encodings between
IBM and everyone else.
--
Terry Jan Reedy
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