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Re: going back to stone axes
At 20:49 2/25/96, Bancroft Scott wrote:
>cme@cybercash.com (Carl Ellison) wrote:
>
>> I don't wish to get into a religious war
so, here we go into the battle... :)
>This argument is similar to the assembler vs. C arguments that I heard
>years ago - By working in C one is seduced into writing inefficient
>code, C relieves you from focusing on making algorithms efficient, C
>makes it easy for you to write convoluted code, C compilers sometimes
>generate invalid code, C requires a learning curve and we all already
>know assembler, etc.. Rubbish!
I'm old enough to remember that battle -- and I was on the ASM side at
first, but was won over rapidly to the higher-level language side. I even
did an entire real-time OS in PASCAL. [I'm not a C fan -- prefer
languages which were designed.]
>ASN.1 is an excellent message
>modelling tool. If you already have it clear in your head the sorts
>of things you don't want to do in ASN.1, then don't do them.
ASN.1 is powerful and simple to use. It's too simple.
I find myself in a similar position to that of advocates of censorship.
I can control my own use of ASN.1 [do it in C first then translate to
ASN.1] but I can't control the other guy and it's the other guy
who needs to be controlled.
ASN.1's ease of use allows people to produce nearly unimplementable
structures and they look elegant. In other words, ASN.1 rewards the
designer of unimplementable structures!
for more on the subject, http://www.clark.net/pub/cme/P1363/asn1.html
and let's discuss it offline [or make a different mailing list for
ASN.1 religious wars].
BTW, the recent comments about international character sets suggest to me
that ASCII might be inappropriate. This doesn't make me support ASN.1
but it does suggest that my ASCII suggestion was too parochial.
- Carl
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