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Thoughts on Canonical S-Expressions (2019)
Datashards currently uses Canonical S-Expressions as a data format and after using it for a few months, I have some thoughts. First thi...
Canonical S-Expressions occupy a strange middle ground where having a formal schema is not strictly necessary, as it's schema-less, but it's also challenging to work without one. Your parser will happily give you a string, but you're stuck needing a reader to do that final conversion, just like you did with XML. To store binary data in either format, you must first convert it to Base64, which introduces an enormous amount of storage and transmission overhead.
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