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Re: spki syntax



I just choose your project for my term paper. I subscribed to the mailing
list to track your progress.

Thanks for the proposel to join the research,

Cheryl Sewell

-----Original Message-----
From: Carl Ellison <cme@cybercash.com>
To: Francesco Zambon <zambon@enidata.it>
Cc: spki@c2.net <spki@c2.net>
Date: Thursday, April 02, 1998 8:12 PM
Subject: Re: spki syntax


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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 would
>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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