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Re: spki syntax
I think at this point we really have to stick with the s-expr
syntax. We're really way to far along in the process to change
anything at this point.
Perry
Carl Ellison writes:
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> At 06:10 PM 4/1/98 +0100, Francesco Zambon wrote:
> >Reading the various drafts of the sdsi & spki efforts I noticed that a
> >large part of the documents is devoted to the definition of ad-hoc spki
> >syntax.
> > The proposals are sometimes non omogeneus and introduce special
> >notations for some specific subjects. As a consequence notations are not so
> >easy to read and understand.
> >
> >In the following lines I examine the adoption of well known syntaxes in
> >order easy the focus on spki semantics which is, at the end, the real
> >problem.
> >
> >can you tellme if it is simply a matter of taste or if importing well
> >defined but foreing notations can bring to positive enhancements to the
> >spki approach
> >
> >regards, Francesco Zambon
>
> Francesco,
>
> the choice between S-expression and XML has been raised before. W3C wo
uld
> like us to use XML. It should be possible to write a translator from XML to
> canonical S-expressions (just as Ron Rivest did the translator from full
> S-expression to canonical).
>
> One of our choices was ease of parsing and canonical form achieves that
.
> (See the parsing code in the package I'm soon to release.)
>
> However, if XML becomes solid and stable, we may well see a move in the
> future to standardize on that. At this point, they seem equivalent and so
> we're sticking with S-expressions.
>
> The use of prolog is very interesting. It should be easy to write a
> 5-tuple reducer in prolog. That would suggest <tag>s in prolog.
>
> However, the resulting certificates might be very hard for people to
> understand. (I remember the effort it took me to learn prolog, after years
> of experience with many languages.) OTOH, I don't want to discourage anyone
> from investigating that possibility. There could be some exciting
> possibilities there. Are you a proficient prolog programmer? Do you want
> to try that research project?
>
> - Carl
>
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References: