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display-types


If you prefer the [x] y style, carl, let's leave it that way, then.  

To answer your question: no, the display-type itself should not have
a display-type.  If you have something like:
	[xx] yy
then you are either displaying this in ASCII (in which case xx is just
printed out as above), or else you are honoring display-types, in which case
the [xx] won't be displayed at all.

Ron Rivest
==============================================================================
Return-Path: <cme@cybercash.com>
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Date: Sat, 29 Mar 1997 14:53:53 -0500
To: rivest@theory.lcs.mit.edu (Ron Rivest)
From: Carl Ellison <cme@cybercash.com>
Subject: S-expressions instead of strings
Cc: spki@c2.net, blampson@microsoft.com
In-Reply-To: <199703291833.AA22655@swan.lcs.mit.edu>
Mime-Version: 1.0

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


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