Portability across architectures..

[Don Libes]

In article <23344 at wlbr.EATON.COM> mh at wlbr.eaton.com.UUCP (Mike Hoegeman) writes:
>In article <641 at muffin.cme-durer.ARPA> libes at cme-durer.arpa (Don Libes) writes:
>>There's another possibility besides ASCII and native form: ASN.1
>
>You may want to check out the eXternal Data Representation specifcation
>as defined by Sun Microsystems. 

Is anyone familiar with both ASN.1 and XDR to give a good comparison?
I've never seen or heard of one, although I assume the XDR authors
must have known about ASN.1 (or X.409 as it used to be called).

I'm aware that ASN.1 was not complete when Sun did RPC.  I always
wondered if 1) they ever considered switching over at some time in the
future, 2) if the two are too functionally dissimilar, or 3) RPC is
better, faster, whatever, than ASN.1.

Since Sun (for example) is moving towards ISO application services,
they will have both ASN.1 and RPC (in source, in memory, etc).

Don Libes          cme-durer.arpa      ...!uunet!cme-durer!libes