🚀 go-pugleaf

enag@ifi.uio.no (Erik Naggum) writes:

>ASN.1 is really a quite simple and neat specification, once you get
>through the language barrier that all ISO standards and CCITT
>recommendations suffer from, but the BER is evil, both in specification
>and in practice.  CCITT is said to suffer to "bitophobia" (abnormal fear
>of wasted bits), and rather thinks that by the time anyone actually
>implements ASN.1 BER, the computers won't notice the overhead in
>unwinding the BER integer and floating-point formats.  (Sorry, this is
>getting out of hand.)

The "bitophobia" exhibited by CCITT is quite justified.  There are 
existing applications that are forced to operate with a very small
bandwidth (e.g., cellular radio control, ground to aircraft control, etc.)
and thus cannot afford to waste a single bit.  Indeed, it is a demonstrated
need by several sectors of industry that has lead to the development
of the Packed Encoding Rules of ASN.1 (PER).  PER exhibits a far more
severe case of "bitophobia" than BER even dreamt of, but satisfies the
needs of those applications that find BER too verbose.

=====================================|========================================
Bancroft Scott			     |		Open Systems Solutions, Inc.
609-987-9073			     |		Princeton, N.J.
=====================================|========================================