[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
S-expressions instead of strings
At 01:33 PM 3/29/97 EST, Ron Rivest wrote:
>What if a Chinese user wants to give appropriate names to the public keys
>of his colleagues? Shouldn't he be able to used unicode, e.g.
> [unicode] chinese-name
Of course he should.
>(or, following my previous note)
> ( display-type unicode chinese-name )
I'm having doubts about this idea, although I like the generality. If we
were programming in LISP, it would be a shoe-in.
If you're using a language like C or PASCAL, I don't think it saves
significant space over the [unicode] variant. In the [y] "xx" form, you
need a pair of pointer slots, one for the display info and one for the
string itself. (Can display types be in non-ASCII and need their own
display types?) In the S-expression form, you need something for each string
to say whether it is a raw byte-string or an S-expression.
I do think it complicates the code which has to use these "tokens". How
does one do string comparisons? Instead of knowing that you compare byte
strings, you need to be prepared to compare string:string, S-exp:S-exp,
S-exp:string, ....
{E.g., would we allow ( display-type ASCII byte-string ) }?
- Carl
+------------------------------------------------------------------+
|Carl M. Ellison cme@cybercash.com http://www.clark.net/pub/cme |
|CyberCash, Inc. http://www.cybercash.com/ |
|207 Grindall Street PGP 2.6.2: 61E2DE7FCB9D7984E9C8048BA63221A2 |
|Baltimore MD 21230-4103 T:(410) 727-4288 F:(410)727-4293 |
+------------------------------------------------------------------+
References: