[Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries]


Macros were withdrawn in around 1990!  They were without doubt a step in the 
wrong direction!

John L


Robin Berjon wrote:

> tpassin@c... wrote:
> 
>> According to some things I have read or been told, ASN.1 was
>> originally developed for people - people communication, to let them
>> explain schemas to each other.  Probably because of that, it turned
>> out to be a bear to parse.  I do not know if the residue of this
>> still plays a role, but full ASN.1 has an awful lot of syntax
>> features.
> 
> 
> Yes, ASN.1 became quite hard to parse at some point, notably when they 
> added macros that could be used before they were defined and had no 
> termination marker -- it was impossible to get right. But I was led to 
> believe that some of the later edits to the specs tried to make things a 
> bit easier.
> 
>> Maybe it is like XML Schema - no one has yet implemented every
>> feature correctly (or have they by now?).
> 
> 
> Well that's a cause for concern, if no one has implemented XML Schema 
> correctly, and no open source implementation of ASN.1 exists, then X.694 
> which bridges both worlds will be unavailable to those of us who can't 
> shell out the cash :/
> 
>> I think that some of the sophisticated encodings like PER are very
>> hard to get right and complete, too (I have never looked into these
>> encodings, so have no first-hand experience here).
> 
> 
> I don't think PER qualifies as "very hard", but yes it certainly 
> qualifies as much harder than BER.
> 

-- 
    Prof John Larmouth
    Larmouth T&PDS Ltd
    (Training and Protocol Development Services Ltd)
    1 Blueberry Road
    Bowdon                               j.larmouth@s...
    Cheshire WA14 3LS
    England
    Tel: +44 161 928 1605		Fax: +44 161 928 8069




Site Map | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | Trademarks
Free Stylus Studio XML Training:
W3C Member