Re: @ SCOS Message Format ?

The following is based on my partial and limited understanding of the
matter. None of this is very important, nor causing any significant
problems, but maybe should be considered. It could be wrong...

On Fri, 21 Feb 2025 02:54:21 +0000, Richard Heathfield wrote:

Well, a newsreader that can't correctly render ASCII is - um... - shall
we say in urgent need of a bug report?

Not really. The ASCII specification includes caret notation for control
characters. In has been like that since the early days.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#Table_of_codes>

The interpretation of the caret and the subsequent character will be
platform and application dependant. Certainly a caret should be rendered
within a integrated development environment, used for writing a program
where the caret is an operator But a caret does not for part of general
English language usage and possibly shouldn't be rendered in an interface
intended to present plain text English language. In these cases it can be
interpreted in one of several ways, as set out above, or to indicate
superscript. Pan does render the caret, it is Thunderbird that removes it
and treats the following character as superscript. I don't know what the
other newreaders do.

 
SCOS does the best it can to help Pan out by leaving untouched anything
it doesn't understand. Perhaps Pan could extend SCOS the same courtesy?
;-)

That would be ideal, but this is not the case where caret forms part of
the encoded character set. Some versions of the SCOS encryption process do
not leave caret untouched. More generally, some versions of SCOS take
common alphanumeric characters, which will not cause any problems, and
substitutes other symbols, like caret, which may be interpreted, quite
correctly, as control characters by a platform. The version you introduced
recently, which excludes the non-alphanumeric characters, is in my opinion
better.

 
Seriously, though, I don't see what can be done. We could remove caret
from the alphabet... but then who's to say that the next Pan release
won't interpret zz as a snooze emoji and 314 as a Greek pi symbol? We
could end up with no alphabet at all!

I'd go with removing all the non-alphanumeric characters. The caret escape
sequence has been around and implemented since the 1960s.

Of course this is only my view.

Best wishes,

PS I do like SCOS.

--
David Entwistle