🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1ispmsINNtuc@ub.d.umn.edu> serickso@ub.d.umn.edu (Scott Erickson) writes:
>
>Previously David.White@launchpad.unc.edu (David White) wrote: 

[deleted question]

>>
>>- What's the deal with StuffIt and Compact Pro?  Are they just 2 rival,
>>incompatible file compressing programs?  Will either one decompress the other?
>Stuffit does not decompress Compact Pro.  I do not know if Compact Pro
>decompresses Stuffit files.
>
>>- What's the deal with BinHex?  Why are most uploaded programs in .HQX
>>format if it makes the file BIGGER?
>BinHex converts a binary file to a text file.  It seems that many programs
>can only handle text files.  Programs like elm, trn, etc do not like binary
>files.  So BinHex converts the binary file to an ASCII file.  The reason it
>is bigger is (I could be wrong) that binary files use the full 8 bits whereas
>ASCII only uses 7 out of the 8 bits.  So more bytes are needed to represent
>the file.

Well, BinHex, uuencode and other similar programs map the entire set of
ascii characters to a set of printable characters. Since the second set is
smaller, combinations of printable characters may be used to represent an
unprintable ascii character. For example, \ & / may be used to denote control
and escape characters respectively : 

control-m : \m, control-M : \M, escape-m : /m and escape-M : /M

and \\ and // would represent \ and /.

If a file had r, c and e regular, control and escape characters respectively,
the unencoded size and encoded size with the above scheme would be
r + c + e and r + 2c + 2e respectively (if we treat \ and / as non-regular).

----------
Shantanu Ganguly
Somerset (Motorola)

phone : (512) 795-7146                  Motorola Inc, Mail Drop OE 513
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                                        Austin TX 78735-8598
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