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

[Christopher Allen <[e-mail]>]

>
>
On Mon, Jul 29, 2024 at 11:21 PM Anders Rundgren <
[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 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.

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.

-- Christopher Allen