Re: base64 behavior is not MIME compliant

[Marc Horowitz <marc@mit.edu>]

Nic Ferrier <nferrier@tapsellferrier.co.uk> writes:

>> Why can't you just pre-parse the data parsed to the base64 decoder? I
>> believe that's the correct behaviour. A base64 decoder should decode
>> base64, not "base64 but also it does this extra trick if you wave your
>> hand in the air"

You could do that, but then the pre-parser needs to know what base64
character sets looks like, so it's not a very clean abstraction.  The
decoder already knows everything it needs to know.  It's also likely
that other apps which want to do base64 decoding will want this same
functionality, so repeating it makes little sense.

But in the end, I don't care strongly if the code is in emacs or in
gnus, as long as it's somewhere.

                Marc