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