It occurred to me that I should say a little about the common thread that underpins pretty much everything I've written here since lifting radio silence, and will continue to do so for some time.

So I alluded to the whole aspie thing 1 a few posts back. The interesting thing there is, when I first decided to look into the various non-normative ( Read more... )

Suppose you're designing a protocol, and you're deliberating over whether to use XML, YAML, JSON, s-expressions (!) or some other data representation format for it.

The question you need to ask yourself is, "have I written an EBNF definition for my protocol yet ( Read more... )

I just wrote an attribute grammar for the general object-encoding rules. (Not all of BER; that's next. Just section 8.1 of X.690.) Unless sections 8.2 through 8.22 throw me a curveball, which it doesn't look like they will, QED. It's fully left-recursive and uses only synthesized attributes, for all your efficient parsing needs. Boo yahIf anyone ( Read more... )