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One of the many nice things about canonical s-expressions[1] is that they combined many of the features of binary and textual protocols. Fast to parse, easy to
by wtbob 11y ago
One of the many nice things about canonical s-expressions[1] is that they combined many of the features of binary and textual protocols. Fast to parse, easy to write a parser for, easy to examine by hand, they were ahead of their time.
[1] http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/Sexp.txt http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/Sexp.txt
- nickpsecurity 11y agoGood points. I used them as a text data structure in the past. Saying the parser was easy to write is an understatement: years of papers and code from LISP/Scheme community had done it dozens of times. Even in hardware. We used it for architecture-neutral data format and mobile code for agent-oriented programming. Fun times. I've considered going back to that in custom designs. It's just that Galois built a high assurance ASN.1 parser, INRIA has a verified parser generator, and ZeroMQ is pretty solid. Too many neat things to consider these days... haha