On 2019-09-16 18:49, Lassi Kortela wrote:
>> Might I interest you in a simple "binary S-expressions" format that
>> can be converted into textual S-expressions and back? I've been
>> wanting to make one for a long time and this would be a perfect
>> application :)
>>
>> Using varints for all numerical quantities, and encoding all strings
>> with a varint length prefix, one gets trivial code with no endianness,
>> escaping or whitespace issues and no size limits. Embedding binary
>> blobs is trivial. A varint type tag can distinguish between different
>> kinds of objects. There are ways to wring more bit density out of all
>> this stuff but I would favor simplicity.
>
> I hacked this up:
> <https://github.com/lassik/scheme-database-temp/blob/master/binary.sls>
>
> 80 lines of Scheme. The "test-binary" program in the same repo shows
> that the library can write its own source code as a binary
> S-expression and read back equal results :)
>
> TODO: numbers other than integers

Hello, I have written a similar thing. Dotted Canonical S-expressions

You can read about it here:
https://gist.github.com/rain-1/a253e47b939fc0769524d8716541c96e

the summary is that it's a compact representation of s-exps which
supports nesting without escaping.