Oh, how I wish more protocols in particular had been defined in something like BNF, and asked themselves for very good reasons why they insist on something that

Oh, how I wish more protocols in particular had been defined in something like BNF, and asked themselves for very good reasons why they insist on something that makes that hard. So many abominations of data structure and protocol designs have come out of people not bothering to write down a grammar of any type until after they'd already come up with something broken.