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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:18:28
Andrew Meredith (meredith@iee.org)
Sun, 21 Feb 1999 11:44:07 +0000
"James A. Donald" wrote:
>
> Warning: I have heard numerous complaints that ASN.1 sucks
> mightily--not that I understand the complaints or am
> competent to judge them.
>
> --digsig
One problem with ASN.1 is simply that if you don't _fully_ understand
it, you can get into serious trouble and its only when you actually get
to the point of using it you finally find out.
There was recently an incident at a certain standards body I sit on
where a change request came through for an ASN.1 based standard. It
looked perfectly sensible at first reading. I read it through with half
an eye and went back to what I was doing. It was only when I read it
again that I realised that the way the structure was now broken. It had
a number of optional elements with no tags, so it would have been
impossible for the parser to pick out which was being used.
This sort of thing, it would seem, is typical of ASN.1. This is not the
case with an explicit binary layout. I quite agree that it is a problem
of education, but is this really the point. You can see with a binary
layout _exactly_ what you are going to get.
So IMHO we have
Advantages:
o Marginally quicker drafting for simple structures.
o Faster development time when using ASN.1 parser.
Disadvantages:
o Easier to introduce subtle problems at standardisation stage that
may not be found until final testing of the implemented product.
o Larger data area required for the same structure, as compared
with binary.
I would be very interested to hear about any other experiences with
ASN.1, particularly those involved in drafting the standards in the
first place.
Cheers
Andy Meredith
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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:18:28