[Python-Dev] Base-85 (original) (raw)

zooko zooko at zooko.com
Mon Aug 11 17:43:21 CEST 2008

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

Martin v. Löwis <martin 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

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list