29 Jan
2021
29 Jan
'21
11:02 p.m.
On Mon, 25 Jan 2021, John Cowan wrote:
I've been messing around with X.680, aka ASN/1.
Its reputation for
horrible evilness, I find, primarily comes from the Packed Encoding
Rules and the interface with statically typed languages, both of which
require dealing with the schema language programmatically. But if you
want to drive it from a dynamically typed language, it's dirt simple: to
write, see what data type you have, output a type and length and value
(or type and value and terminator), and there you are.
I was never quite sure what to make of ASN.1 and BER; it seemed to solve
the problem of OpenLDAP applications talking to each other (and I got
quite good at reading wire traces), but it somehow seemed wrong when every
box was running FreeBSD on Intel/AMD.
-- Dave