However, the biggest problem with ASN.1 in my opinion is that it promises
much more than it delivers.
While I agree with this in part, I am also balanced by a wariness when it
comes to potential replacements for it. Straight text is great for many
things, but it's awfully malleable, especially when going through the
inevitable application-level gateways.
I think ASN.1 macros were a really terrible idea in ASN.1 and we'd all
be better off without them.
This I have to agree with. In fact, in general I think that the language
itself has a few too many degrees of freedom, but that the basic ideas are
quite sound.
Another major problem is the lack of decent documentation.
Hmm. This is certainly true. I think that the CCITT blue books are among
the biggest impediment to the adoption of the standards they describe, and
the ISO versions are no better.
After reading it [Steedman's book] I immediately deleted all the code I
had and started over, and I was able to implement X.400-1984 in a
straightforward way without any major incidents after that.
Yes, Steedman's book is very good. I ended up just meditating on IS 8824 &
8825 and looking at BER hex dumps until understanding dawned. It did take
a while. On the other hand, I've found that many ISO & ITU standards are
like this--it's often not that the standards defined by them are bad, but
that the standards documents themselves were written by bureaucrats with
speech impediments. X.400 is a prime example: I became an X.400
booster (back in the pre-MIME days) once I finally figured out what X.400-1988
was actually trying to describe. I still think it's technically superior
to MIME, but it has a trememdously shallow learning curve in comparison.
I have a little ASN.1 routine library (2500 lines or so) that I use and I just
crank out code based on that. It is just not that hard once you really
understand what's going on -- the understanding was the hard part.
This is fair enough.
Amanda Walker
InterCon Systems Corporation