[Python-Dev] Base-96 (original) (raw)

Josiah Carlson josiah.carlson at gmail.com
Sat Aug 2 18:09:12 CEST 2008

The standard high-bit-density encoding past base-64 is base-85 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascii85), which encodes 4 binary bytes as 5 ascii bytes, versus 3 binary bytes as 4 ascii bytes. It works, is an RFC somewhere, ... and maybe should find it's way into the Python standard library's codec package at some point.

On Sat, Aug 2, 2008 at 12:57 AM, Kless <jonas.esp at googlemail.com> wrote:

It's true, I didn't pay attention to that.

So the next encoding possible would of base-128 (7-bits encoding), althought I don't know if were possible since that there would than use non-printable characters and could change the text (by use of chars. as Backspace or Delete). On 2 ago, 03:21, Steve Holden <st... at holdenweb.com> wrote: 96 is approximately 2^6.585

For some reason, integral powers of two seem so much more, well, POWERFUL, if you know what I mean. Frankly I think you are being either optimistic or charitable in suggesting that such a use case might exist. There's a reason that DEC called their equivalent of base64 "6-bit encoding". But then I wanted to keep integer division as it was, so I am clearly a techno-luddite. If the world wants fractional bits I'm sure it's only a matter of time before some genius decides to design a 67.9-bit computer.

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