3 ms·
Why does ASN.1 allow such large arc numbers? Is this a result of being designed before a reasonable (32 bit) word size was common enough to depend on? Ie that e
by MichaelGG 11y ago
Why does ASN.1 allow such large arc numbers? Is this a result of being designed before a reasonable (32 bit) word size was common enough to depend on? Ie that everyone would have to implement "bignum" so might as well set no limit?
It still seems questionable that they'd let any length be set, especially since you can just chain numbers together into a longer OID.
Base128 encoding seems fair though; the other varint formats are more exotic and only work with many ints at once.
- masklinn 11y ago> Why does ASN.1 allow such large arc numbers? Is this a result of being designed before a reasonable (32 bit) word size was common enough to depend on? Ie that everyone would have to implement "bignum" so might as well set no limit? I assume that's because OID nodes are essentially namespaces, giving an arbitrary upper bound to node ids would artificially and "unnecessarily" limit the size of the corresponding namespace. That looks like a "correct versus realistic" debate which was won by the "correct" side.