Re: OT: Re: [Chicken-users] rails-like framework

[Shawn Rutledge]

On 4/25/06, John Cowan <address@hidden> wrote:
> In that case you might as well use ASN.1, which has the advantage of
> being an international standard with multiple data representations
> available (including a textual one).  IMHO there is little point in
> concocting yet another binary representation of XML.

What I don't like about ASN.1 is the data is not self-describing - you
need to specify a sort of schema or IDL which defines the parameters
in the messages, and then at runtime the assignment of actual
parameters to formal ones is positional, right?  The design becomes
way too rigid and brittle - you can't add or remove parameters, or
give them in the wrong order, and you can't intercept a message and
decipher it without the schema.  Maybe you could use it for simple
remote function calls though - let the Scheme function definition
drive the message format.