[om] Re: Bugs in OpenMath standard draft 3

Bill Naylor Bill.Naylor at mcs.vuw.ac.nz
Fri Nov 21 07:42:37 CET 2003


I have noticed a bug (I think) in section 4.2.2

In the encoding for Symbols, it states

  "are encoded as the symbol tags (token identifier 8) ..."

   Then later it says

   "The symbol tags [8] and [8+128] are deprecated ..."

   I guess the first line should say "(token identifier 9)"?

I also have a query about the encoding for big integers, in the most
general form. Why are they encoded as a length, followed by the base 10 or
base 16 representation as characters? Surely if the idea of this encoding
is compactness, it is better to send the size and the value. This would give
a saving of a factor of two for base 16 and more for base 10! You don't
lose any information because you still know that the 'source' OpenMath is
base 10/16 because of the 'sign/base' byte.

cheers,

Bill


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