🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1537@alliant.Alliant.COM> rosenkra@alliant.UUCP (Bill Rosenkranz) writes:
>is binHex in the public domain or is it a commercial/proprietary product?
>can source be obtained? if so could it be posted in comp.sources.atari.st?
>better yet: has binHex been ported to the atari? if so could someone please
>post/email to me?

There are probably many who use BinHex or UU{en,de}CODE without
without knowing what they do, and there are probably others who do not
know about the existence of the "other" encoding function.

BinHex is an easy enough program to write.

Its purpose is to turn a binary file into something that has only
printable characters, so that it can be e-mailed over networks
that might respond to control characters, and, perhaps,
( cough,  gasp ) be read!

Each OCTET ( 8 bit byte ) of the binary file is split into two nibbles,
4 bits each.  Each nibble is used as a pointer to index into the vector
"0123456789ABCDEF" with 16 elements.  Thus, for each byte of the binary
file, you get two hexadecimal characters.  The result is a file with
twice as many characters as the original file.  Some people have become
experts at reading this stuff.  Their heads have 16 sides.  They will
become telephone sanitizers.  :-)

On the other hand, the UUencode program does an encoding that takes
each set of three octets (24 bits) and produces 4 printable characters,
by a rule that uses each set of 6 bits to index into a vector string
with 64 elements.  You can see what these are by looking at a UUencoded
file.  The result is a file 4/3 the size of the original.  The inverse
function is UUdecode.  Most folks that have UUencode-UUdecode are not
interested in BinHex.  Probably the best functions of this type are
UUE and UUD done by J-P Dumas.

-- 
 L. J. Dickey, Faculty of Mathematics, University of Waterloo.
	ljdickey@waterloo.edu
	ljdickey@WATDCS.UWaterloo.ca	ljdickey@water.BITNET
	ljdickey@water.UUCP	or	...!uunet!water!ljdickey