[Python-Dev] Base-85

[zooko]

On Aug 2, 2008, at 13:58 PM, Antoine Pitrou wrote:

> Martin v. Löwis <martin <at> v.loewis.de> writes:
>>
>> 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.
>
> According to Wikipedia, "its main modern use is in Adobe's  
> PostScript and
> Portable Document Format file formats".
... git ... mercurial ... bzr

It's sort of too bad about the April Fool's RFC, because now people  
tend to think that an encoding with a non-power-of-2 base is just a  
joke.

I had to overcome that when working with my programming partner, but  
he eventually decided that base-62 was indeed a useful encoding for  
our purposes.  :-)

I've written a few ascii encoders over the years, mostly in Python,  
plus an optimized C version of base-32 (with a real live Duff's Device):

base62.py:

http://allmydata.org/source/z-base-62/trunk-hashedformat/z-base-62/ 
base62/base62.py

base36.py:

http://allmydata.org/source/z-base-36/trunk-hashedformat/z-base-36/ 
base36/base36.py

base32.py:

http://allmydata.org/source/z-base-32/trunk-hashedformat/base32/ 
base32/base32.py

base32.c:

http://allmydata.org/source/z-base-32/trunk-hashedformat/base32/base32.c

Regards,

Zooko