📅 Original date posted:2012-12-03 📝 Original message:On Mon, Dec 03, 2012 at 05:34:12PM -0500, Jeff Garzik wrote: > You shouldn't need to escape and unescape data that is not being > interpreted in any way. Funilly enough pretty much all low-level links that make up the Internet use either bit-stuffing or byte-stuffing to escape a particular bit sequence or byte that terminates an HDLC frame. I'm not particularly agreeing or disagreeing with you on the suitability for the case at hand, but as an absolute your statement doesn't hold water. The use of a terminator for a variable-length data structure rather than a length prefix is a design desicion that has little-to-nothing to do with the debate of text-versus-binary. Anyone remember Holerith constants? roy