Re: [9fans] asn.1 alternatives

[Dan Cross <cross@math.psu.edu>]

On Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 02:29:19PM +0000, Charles Forsyth wrote:
> also, in my experience, managers (pointy-head or not) are rarely overly
> caught up by the technical details.  they just want such-and-such a problem
> to go away.  they usually don't really care how you do it, especially if it
> works well and they never ever have to cut short a trip to the golf course
> because of it.

I think, perhaps, that this is less true than it once was.  In particular,
they need to answer to marketting and ensure that the product is sufficiently
buzzword compliant.  But my point in bringing up the managerial team in the
first place was just to demonstrate that sometimes the person doing the
implementation doesn't *really* have all that much control over the choices
made for the implementation.  An extreme example would be, say, if I were
writing a Windows application.  I probably don't have much ability to write
it for another system (Unix, Plan 9, whatever) instead because I'd prefer
that.

As for ASN.1 alternatives....  When you have a choice, I would agree that
S expressions are compelling.  Another option is YAML, which is becoming
popular in the scripting language world, and is fairly reasonable, even for
representing complex hierarchical objects.

	- Dan C.