[Info-vax] VMS-based InfoServer

[Phillip Helbig---undress to reply]

In article <b-6dnVQ2CthgS8TRnZ2dnUVZ_uKdnZ2d at earthlink.com>, "John
Reagan" <johnrreagan at earthlink.net> writes: 

> Since the format for quoted-printable is an equal sign followed by two hex 
> digits, you need someway to denote a real equal sign.  You can't omit it 
> since you then can't tell if an equal sign followed by two hex digits is a 
> quoted-printable or just an equal sign followed by two hex digits in the 
> actual output.

The main point is that QP is just not necessary for 7-bit printable
ASCII.  End of story.  While there might be some justification for 8-bit
stuff (since there is more than one 8-bit character set, simply allowing
8 bits is not a solution unless one specifies the character set as
well), "=" is a poor choice of escape.  Some rarer character, such as
"\" (used by TeX, for this reason) would have been better.

> Then there is the use of equal as a soft line break to handle long lines 
> with SMTP (which has line length restrictions).

Best solved by not writing long lines in the first place.