[TUHS] tangential unix question: whatever happened to NeWS?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Mon, 25 Jan 2021, John Cowan wrote:

> I've been messing around with X.680, aka ASN/1.  Its reputation for 
> horrible evilness, I find, primarily comes from the Packed Encoding 
> Rules and the interface with statically typed languages, both of which 
> require dealing with the schema language programmatically.  But if you 
> want to drive it from a dynamically typed language, it's dirt simple: to 
> write, see what data type you have, output a type and length and value 
> (or type and value and terminator), and there you are.

I was never quite sure what to make of ASN.1 and BER; it seemed to solve 
the problem of OpenLDAP applications talking to each other (and I got 
quite good at reading wire traces), but it somehow seemed wrong when every 
box was running FreeBSD on Intel/AMD.

-- Dave