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A rather old message that didn't make it to the list - I replied to it but forgot to forward the original. -- Alex
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- To: srfi-56@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Subject: BER encoding
- From: oleg@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 8 Jul 2004 11:56:10 -0700 (PDT)
- Cc: foof@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hello! I'd like to second the proposal to support the BER encoding of integers. Granted, more efficient encodings could be devised (especially if we have some idea about the distribution of integers in our domain). An Appendix to Witten et al book "Text compression" lists quite a numbers of various encodings of arbitrary integers, some of which are quite nifty. However, the BER encoding mentioned in SRFI-56 is the ISO standard. Furthermore, the BER encoding of integers is used in many other BER/DER rules for more complex ASN.1 objects. ASN.1 (which some say is a better version of XML) is still wildly used, e.g., in SNMP and LDAP and CMS (cryptographic message syntax, aka the "new" S/MIME). In fact, BER appears almost in any RFC that contains the word 'crypto'. See, for example, Section 3 of http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2792.txt as well http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3280.txt http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3369.txt The best guide on BER/DER and ASN.1 is Burton S. Kaliski Jr. A Layman's Guide to a Subset of ASN.1, BER, and DER. An RSA Laboratories Technical Note. Revised November 1, 1993. Available online: http://luca.ntop.org/Teaching/Appunti/asn1.html http://www.alw.nih.gov/Security/FIRST/papers/crypto/pkcs/layman.ps and very many other places: just Google for "Burton S. Kaliski Jr. Layman's Guide"
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