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Re: specification language?

On Wed, 6 Mar 1996, Carl Ellison wrote:

> How do folks feel about using Java as the specification language for
> certificates?

Java is a programming language, and it's data types are not very suitable 
for describing content encodings- even the java class file format isn't 
speced in java. 

better choices might be:

1) something C like:
        typedef struct {
                string name;
                int version;
                public_key key;
        } certificate;

        typedef struct {
                int size;
                char data[size];
        } string;


2) some ad hoc type notation

        certificate ::= sequence {
                           name string,
                           version int,
                           key     public_key
        }
        int ::= integer; string ::= octet string 


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