1. Coding, second try
- Posted by "Wallace B. Riley" <wryly at MINDSPRING.COM>
Dec 16, 1997
-
Last edited Dec 17, 1997
Hello again again:
I sent this message before apparently with a bad address, it bounced. Try
again:
I'm confused by MIME and BinHex. I don't understand what they are or what
they do, or how they differ from the good old easy-to-understand ASCII.
Recently I had trouble with several documents attached to a message and
encoded in MIME. I could send them but they were not received by the
addressee, who was Art Adamson. I finally got them to him by specifying BinHex.
I'd like to know more than just a translation of the acronyms. What *are*
they, deep down inside? Does anybody know?
And oh yes, what is this 'Causeway', frequently mentioned in Listserv messages?
I seem to be way out there in left field, am I not?
Wally Riley
wryly at mindspring.com
2. Re: Coding, second try
>I'd like to know more than just a translation of the acronyms. What *are*
>they, deep down inside? Does anybody know?
Well the idea behind MIME and BinHEX (BinHEX is a program, and MIME is a
standard) is to "translate" a binary file (like zip files, exe's, etc...)
into files created only by visible ASCII characters (so they can be sent by
email). About MIME I declare ignorant, but you can image how BinHEX in this
way:
Imagine you code a routine that replaces the binary value of a charatcer
with the two character combination of it's value in hexadecimal, example:
A would be 41 (that is 65 in hexadecimal)
HI would be 4849 (that is 72 an 73 in hex)
Using this method the file increases it's size, but will only be componed by
the characters 0..9 and A..F
