Re: [TUHS] tangential unix question: whatever happened to NeWS?

[John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>]

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On Mon, Jan 25, 2021 at 10:56 AM Richard Salz <rich.salz@gmail.com> wrote:


> DCE RPC was based on Apollo NCS which was a very elegant RPC system built
> on UDP. It had no XDR because it was "reader makes it right" and datatypes
> were tagged.
>

I've been messing around with X.680, aka ASN/1.  Its reputation for
horrible evilness, I find, primarily comes from the Packed Encoding Rules
and the interface with statically typed languages, both of which require
dealing with the schema language programmatically.  But if you want to
drive it from a dynamically typed language, it's dirt simple: to write, see
what data type you have, output a type and length and value (or type and
value and terminator), and there you are.

I've got a little back burner project called Twinjo that provides two
equivalent serialization formats: X.680 and an extensible S-expression
format.  If anyone's interested, you can read about it at <
https://github.com/johnwcowan/r7rs-work/edit/master/Twinjo.md>.



John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan@ccil.org
He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars;
General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer:
For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars.
  --William Blake, il miglior fabbro

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