::scr Ramblings of a Classic Refugee or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love OS X

[Alaric Snell]

On Wednesday 06 February 2002 11:33, you wrote:

> > Why just make ASCII special? Why not start with something a little higher
> > level, like BER?
>
> For the reasons outlined earlier - you need something that is universally
> acessible, which ASCII is and BER isn't.

BER is pretty universally accessible... you can download free tools to decode 
it for display, and ASCII can't represent many foreign languages, so is not 
something I would try to build any kind of serious data interchange upon!

LDAP and SNMP are both based on BER. Those protocols have hardly failed, have 
they? NFS and YP use XDR, and nobody moans that NFS is hard to debug because 
it's not in plain text. Because when you're dealing with an XDR, you use an 
XDR tool. Having to download something rather than using Notepad is just not 
a problem in practice!

ABS

-- 
                               Alaric B. Snell
 http://www.alaric-snell.com/  http://RFC.net/  http://www.warhead.org.uk/
   Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software