On 5/18/25 11:21 PM, Nico Williams wrote:
ABNF is generally good for the things it's been used for, but it's not
really a very good formal language.
ASN.1 is much better, though of course you still need a ton of normative
natural language.
Its been a very long time since I wrote, or even read, ASN.1 in any
meaningful way. But t is is not generally an alternative to ABNF. ABNF
provides the author with broad control over the encoding. This allows
human readable encodings, if desired. This is typically an important
aspect of most ABNF uses I'm aware of.
IIRC, typical uses of ASN.1 will yield encodings that are not human
readable.
My one significant use of ASN.1 left me hoping never to use it again.
My impression is that there are now a variety of other specification
languages (e.g., CDDL) that are often preferable to ASN.1.
No one formal language is going to meet all needs.
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