Re: [Chicken-hackers] blob-literal read syntax

[Magnus Achim Deininger]

Ah true, I had forgotten that the original post was about new read syntax  
for blobs, not read/write syntax.

For the sake of discussion, I'll sum up the typical yEnc Syntax:

=ybegin<text>=yend

<text> is mostly the blob contents verbatim, i.e. without converting it to  
hex first, except for some special characters.

yEnc wouldn't even conflict with the hex syntax since it requires a  
prefix/suffix pair, so it might still be worth looking into for the write  
syntax if there would be one :). It's smaller than base64 as well, which  
Thomas might like.

Other than that, I'd think the R6RS bytevector syntax suffers from using  
regular number syntax for each of the bytes in the vector: pretty much all  
bytes would be written in decimal by default, which i'd think to be  
confusing when entering a blob. I'd imagine I'd want to enter short memory  
dumps or fixed protocol data when I'd want to manually enter a blob, hex  
seems more natural and manageable for that.

Cheerio,
Magnus

On Fri, 22 Oct 2010 16:34:05 +0200, Peter Bex <address@hidden> wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 04:28:17PM +0200, Magnus Achim Deininger wrote:
> > What about yEnc instead of a sequence of numbers?
>
> This discussion is about a convient notation for humans to enter blobs
> directly, not about an efficient way to store blobs on disk.
>
> I for one have no idea what the yEnc format looks like nor could I
> easily transcribe what's in my mind to that format.  Hex, I can manage :)
>
> Cheers,
> Peter