Re: OT: Re: [Chicken-users] rails-like framework

[John Cowan]

john scripsit:

> With ASN.1 there is a separation between how the protocol is described
> and how it is represented "on the wire". As the other John mentioned,
> depending on application requirements you can choose different encoding
> techniques.

Yes.  Thanks for making this clear.

> Ones like Basic Encoding Rules (BER) encode a "tag" structure together
> with the values. Packed Encoding Rules (PER) attempts to send the
> minimum amount of data so does not encode this structure. Although
> this concise encoding is a little less flexible the values encoded
> may still be optional and you may send them in any order if you use
> the right datatype.

And now we also have XER (XML Encoding Rules), which are a defined way
of representing ASN.1 as XML.  The reverse, encoding arbitrary XML as
ASN.1, is also extant, but not (the last time I looked) fully cooked as
an international standard yet.

I once suggested to a particularly persistent advocate of ASN.1 on the
xml-dev mailing list that he could PER-encode his emails by representing
the author as 0x01 and leaving the rest of the message to be inferred
by the recipient.  Fortunately for me, he had a good sense of humor.

-- 
John Cowan      address@hidden        http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
        Is it not written, "That which is written, is written"?