> So why not /lib/ndb format: textual attribute=value pairs > with grouping?
Because (a) they are language/alphabet specific and (b) they are inefficient. Before you jump down my throat, I am aware that the inefficiencies smack of premature optimisation, but in ASN.1 days they were mere failures of vision. And I do maintain that saving processor cycles and storage is not a futile quest. The corollary to Moore's Law is "Software bloat exceeds any gains in processor performance even before such gains can be exploited". It also strikes me as remarkable that you'd think ASN.1 is intended to represent C structures. I would think the intent was to be a message format on the wire and the internal representation was left as a matter of implementation. The latter, of course, is where it all fell apart because (a) there were issues that could not be finalised without conflict and (b) there were mistakes that were only discovered once different implementations could not interoperate. In the latter case, I have to concede that the IETF is better geared for the laying down of standards. Skip is right in that standards ought not to be accepted until there has been an implementation, but of course that sword has two edges, too. ++L
