Comment by rakoo
11 years ago
> there is a _single_ canonical encoding for any datum: the messages above would be (7:message(6:header(6:sender13:Billy Joe Bob)(4:sent20:2015-03-26T12:02:00Z))(4:body35:Hey guys! Let's meet up for lunch!))
This reminds me a lot of bencode, with the advantage for bencode that it doesn't need any fiddling for non-printable characters: no more base64, no more hex.
The base64 & hex stuff is only used for the advanced, human-readable bits; on the wire it's just straight length-encoding and byte strings.
I'd say that bencode's advantage is a built-in standard for integer encoding (with canonical S-expressions one must decide between ASCII decimals or little/big-endian bit strings), and a clearer standard for a dictionary/map/hash (a canonical S-expression would probably use an alist-like structure like (map (foo bar) (baz quux)), but one could also go with (map foo bar baz quux), (map (foo bar baz quux)) or some other encoding.