FW: First Attempt at Crypto Library

Matt Harden matth@mindspring.com
Thu, 24 Apr 2003 23:22:19 -0500


Martin Sjögren wrote:
> ons 2003-04-23 klockan 10.52 skrev Simon Marlow:
> 
>>The options for Base64 and friends are therefore: Codec.Binary.Base64,
>>Codec.Base64, or Codec.General.Base64.  Or even
>>Codec.BinaryToText.Base64?  None stands out as the obvious choice to me,
>>but we could defer the decision until the library actually exists ;-)
> 
> 
> Never do today, what you can put off until tomorrow, eh? :) I think
> "Binary" is a bad name. What does it mean anyway?

It's obvious to me.  Binary means that the codec in question is designed 
to cope with arbitrary binary data.  The codecs in the other categories 
*cannot* do that.  If binary is a bad name, one could use OctetStream, 
which is more descriptive, but much less commonly used.  I actually 
don't mind BinaryToText; it certainly says what it does.

> ... I don't think it adds
> any information to have Codec.Binary.Base64 rather than Codec.Base64.
> What other interesting encodings would you put in Codec.Binary?

QuotedPrintable
UUencode
{X,Y,Z}modem (protocols, not codecs? but I'm sure there's a codec or 2 
in there somewhere)
Yenc
Base32
Motorola S-record format (OK, not so interesting)

I seem to be in the minority (a minority of one?), but I don't want to 
have both modules and directories in the main Codec directory.  It makes 
more sense to me if each codec module name had the consistent form:

	Codec.<Classification>.<Name>

Thanks,
Matt