[Cbor] Re: I-D Action: draft-mcnally-deterministic-cbor-10.html

[Anders Rundgren <[e-mail]>]

Hi Christopher,

On 2024-07-30 22:22, Christopher Allen wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Jul 29, 2024 at 11:21 PM Anders Rundgren <[e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
> 
>     On 2024-07-29 15:49, Joe Hildebrand wrote:
> 
>      > - I'm still not sold on bidirectional diagnostic notation, and have not planned on writing a parser for it, but I'm still thinking about that.  However, I don't see what it has to do with this discussion.
> 
> 
>     Well, it has.  This feature permits writing and reading fully compatible CDE from external text based databases [1].  Gordian Envelopes rely on a similar feature but using dCBOR.
> 
> 
> To be clear, we do have something called Envelope Notation, but it is not bidirectional. It is designed to make the envelope structures clear for debugging purposes only.
> 
> ```
> "Alice" [
>      "knows": "Bob"
> ]
> ```
> 
> or with --tree
> 
> ```
> e54d6fd3 NODE
>      27840350 subj "Alice"
>      55560bdf ASSERTION
>          7092d620 pred "knows"
>          9a771715 obj "Bob"
> ```
> We do have a `dcbor-cli` app
> https://github.com/BlockchainCommons/bc-dcbor-cli <https://github.com/BlockchainCommons/bc-dcbor-cli> that supports basic CBOR diagnostic output, but I would not say that it is a full implementation of latest notation specs — again, our purpose is not round trip but to enable clarity of structures for debugging. I'm not even sure we test round-tripping.
> 

Thanx!

> An important point here is that round-tripping of binary to text and back can actually get in the way of useful debugging support for software engineers.

FWIW, this ability is why I prefer CDE.  If you write 2.0 in the left window of https://cbor.me and press the -> button it will come out as CBOR hex in the right window.  If you then push the <- button it will still render as 2.0.  Using the dCBOR option breaks this scheme.

This is an intrinsic part of what I call the Enterprise Application profile: https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/cbor/PFZXSxyvQ7zG6Cj6QmzHd-_K52g/

Anders

> 
> -- Christopher Allen