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From: David Entwistle <qnivq.ragjvfgyr@ogvagrearg.pbz>
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Subject: Re: @ SCOS Message Format ?
Date: Fri, 21 Feb 2025 02:03:28 -0000 (UTC)
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On Mon, 10 Feb 2025 03:29:37 +0000, Richard Heathfield wrote:

> 
01000001011...

I'm afraid I haven't been following the discussion on SCOS Message Format, 
but would offer a comment, which may have been covered. If not here it is:

Due to some recent technical challenges I have been reading USENET using 
two newsreaders; Thunderbird and Pan. Both are excellent, but handle 
certain parts of the character set differently. 

Under some circumstances, Thunderbird removes the caret (character 94 
dec.) and makes the following character a superscript - indicating one 
character raised to the power of the second. This is excellent when that 
is what is intended. Not so good, when it is not what was intended. Pan 
doesn't do this.

Pan uses the asterisk (character 42 dec.) to embolden characters. I think 
it looks for pairs and intends to act on anything between, but the rules 
concerning spaces and other characters may complicate the interpretation. 
As I recall, the asterisks are not removed. I'm not sure exactly what's 
going on, but a sequence of glyphs seems to result in the loss of 
character return and line feeds.

There are probably some other more subtle consequences, but I don't think 
we can assume that all readers will reliably receive all the characters we 
intend them to receive, other than the basic alphanumeric ones, via their 
various newsreaders. Checking compatibility would be challenging and there 
isn't much you can do about it.

Consequently, if SCOS introduces a lot of these lesser used characters, 
which may have different actions in different newsreaders, we're going to 
confuse all but the most technical and dedicated readers (this is possibly 
considered a good thing).

Just a thought for consideration.

-- 
David Entwistle