Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!ai.toronto.edu!rayan
From: rayan@ai.toronto.edu (Rayan Zachariassen)
Subject: Re: ASCII/EBCDIC Translation
Message-ID: <1987Dec15.101835.3795@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu>
Organization: University of Toronto, AI group
References: <425@minya.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 15-Dec-87 10:18:35 EST

In article <1622@van-bc.UUCP> skl@van-bc.UUCP (Samuel Lam) writes:
# In article <425@minya.UUCP> jc@minya.UUCP (John Chambers) writes:
# )...  Are there 64 codes that can be trusted to any ASCII/EBCDIC translators,
# )and will come out the same when fed to any other EBCDIC/ASCII translator?
# 
# The upper *and* lower case alphabet and the digits together make up 62 of
# these characters.  Anyone have suggestions for the two more to go?

Yes, + and -. Why? Because it has already been done that way. A couple of
programs called rscs{en,de}code were written by Reg Quinton & Ken Lalonde
to protect news batches flowing over BITNET/NetNorth a year or two ago.
In my experience, even though uuencoded data can be mangled by the random
machines a message travels through, I've never had any problem when using
rscs*code. In addition, it is just as efficient as uuencode on BITNET,
because the LRECL of 80 is partially wasted by the 60-odd linelength used
by uu*code, but rscs*code uses 79 characters per line, which translates into
about the same number of card images for both encodings. It is in use on
one of the news backbone links (watmath--utgpu).

rayan