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SDSI syntax
Excellent question (below); this was indeed a fine point where the
documentation is inconsistent. The examples are correct; the text should
have been modified to state that:
In some cases an entry of the form:
( attribute: value)
is replaced by an object:
( object-type: ... )
This looks similar syntactically, but a strict attribute-value encoding
would have resulted in the uglier:
( object-type: ( object-type: ... ) )
These cases are easily recognized by the object-types used.
Thanks,
Ron Rivest
==============================================================================
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 1996 15:00:43 -0700 (PDT)
From: Wei Dai <weidai@eskimo.com>
To: Ron Rivest <rivest@theory.lcs.mit.edu>
On Mon, 29 Apr 1996, Ron Rivest wrote:
> The ability to nest objects inside each other is tremendously powerful
> and useful. That is one reason why in SDSI[1] Butler Lampson and I
> decided in favor of fully parenthesized S-expressions, rather than having
> data structures that are flat (as I understand the whois++ data structures
> are).
I just have one minor question about the nesting syntax. In the paper you
represent SDSI objects using lists:
( type:
( Attribute1: value1 )
... )
But in an earlier example:
(Principal:
( Public-Key:
( Algorithm: ... )
... ) )
In this case we have a nested object of type Public-Key: inside an object
of type Principal:. But Public-Key: can also be interpreted as an
attribute instead of a type. Which interpretation is correct?
Wei Dai