ASN.1 - ANY, ANY DEFINED BY and EXTERNAL types?

[Kenneth Lundin]

maillist wrote:

> Hi,
> from the documentation
>
> http://www.erlang.org/documentation/lib/asn1-1.2.7/doc/html/asn1_ug.html#1.4
>
> it states that these types are not supported in (version 1.03),
>
> I have tried an experiment with the latest version OTP R6B and this seems
> to be
> still the case.

Yes ANY, ANY DEFINED BY and EXTERNAL is still not supported. When the
development of the
compiler started I took the decision to support the 1994 standard where ANY
and ANY DEFINED BY was removed.
Since then the standards has grown and the whole area iaround ASN.1 is very big
with Information Object Classes,
Parameterization, Constraints , PER etc. and it is very hard to support
everything in those standards. It  is also difficult
to make a choice of what is most important to support next. Therefore my
current strategy is to implement new things
based on what my customers need and based upon the actual ASN.1 specifications
that they want to implement contains.

I have realised that it is necessary to support ANY and other things from the
old 1988 standard at the same time  as
the new stuff because there are quite many specifications based on that
standard that are still interesting.

Currently a preliminary list of planned enhancements and new functionality
looks like this:
- Bugfixes
- Enhanced performance in encode/decode (as always)
- Improved handling of values (necessary)
- Information Object Classes
- PER (unaligned)
- ANY, ANY DEFINED BY
- EXTERNAL ... (I have plans to define  a special module "ASN1" which specifies
EXTERNAL and other "known" types and let the
    compiler  look into that module whenever necessary.

>

If someone else can provide a solution for ANY, ANY DEFINED BY etc. I will be
happy to include it.

>
>
> has anybody done any work on this or is it something that somebody is
> looking at for the future?
>
> regards
> Kevin

regards Kenneth

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Kenneth Lundin              Ericsson Utvecklings AB
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