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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:18:28
Niels Möller (nisse@lysator.liu.se)
23 Feb 1999 17:02:59 +0100
pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann) writes:
> The problem isn't ASN.1, it's how it's used, or as the old saying goes, "The
> determined programmer can write FORTRAN in any language". ASN.1 is just
> another programming language, and like any language it's possible to write
> complete crap in it.
I guess you're right here.
> ASN.1, if used properly, is an extremely elegant and powerful
> notation for describing data formats.
I'm not so sure about this... I once tried to write a grammer for
ASN.1, for a LR parser generator. I.e., parsing the type descriptions,
not just the encoded data objects. I failed. I'm not even convinced
that ASN.1 is unambigous. I have heard that things like SNMP that uses
ASN.1 heavily uses a well defined subset of ASN.1, which should be
easier to parse.
> For opposite ends of the scale, compare things like PFX (described
> in http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/pfx.html)
I have a half-written PFX-parser. So far, it's the absolutely ugliest
standard I have tried to understand. *puke*
> PKCS #15 (which is a kind of tour de force of what you can do with
> ASN.1 if you know how to use it).
I haven't seen this one. What is it about?
/Niels
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:18:28