From: John Cowan <xxxxxx@ccil.org>

Date: Fri, Sep 27, 2019 at 12:39 PM

On Fri, Sep 27, 2019 at 11:26 AM <xxxxxx@ancell-ent.com> wrote:

I'm assuming these lengths are purely local in scope, there's nothing that says "the complete thing I'm writing is X long, and here's part 1, part 2, etc."?

No, that's exactly what it says.  The translation of (8 "fx" ()) is:

E0 (list type) 09 (length in bytes)

   02 (integer type) 01 (length of integer in bytes) 08 (integer data)

   0C (UTF-8 type) 02 (length of string in bytes) 66 78 (UTF-8 data)

   E0 (list type) 00 (length of list in bytes

And that's it.  Byte lengths > 127 are encoded specially in 2 or more bytes.

That design allows you to efficiently skip over objects you don't want to convert to internal form, not so much because they are understood but uninteresting, but because they are not understood at all.

Errr, failure to communicate.  But "complete thing", I meant the entire sequential set of results from encoding a bunch of stuff, like, say, the complete set of details about a n-billion transistor CPU.  Each node and connection in that being "local in scope".

If the "local in scope" data fits into the multi-megabyte L3 cache of one of those insane CPUs like the one I'm typing this on, no problem.

- Harold