Why the special character restriction?

[Russ Allbery]

Anne Wilson <anne at unidata.ucar.edu> writes:

> Setting aside the issue of resources, sounds like you're saying that the
> only potentially "unsolvable" problem (without mucking with the
> protocol) is that CRLF indicates the end of a message, which could be
> erroneous in the context of binary data.

Right.

> Because we currently do mainly streaming transmission, for our purposes 
> it might be sufficient to simply add a byte count parameter to TAKETHIS. 
> Do you think more commands would be necessary?  (Although I can imagin 
> cases where we might want to do some batched transmission.)