[ih] Design choices in SMTP

[Dave Crocker]

On 2/7/2023 10:05 AM, Johan Helsingius wrote:
> Interesting! I wonder how much more efficient that was than the usual
> schemes of using just non-control ASCII characters. 

I haven't looked at the code or thought about this, in some decades.

The answer is basically a matter of the basic math of encoding 
alternatives and the basic statistics of character frequencies.

To the extent the answer is important, responding to the answer pretty 
much mandates including a data compression scheme in the mix.

d/

-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
mast:@dcrocker at mastodon.social