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formic.id

notes

Barely Even Structured Text (BEST)

Spaces are separators outside of double quotes and escape sequences.

Strings are prefixed by ' or delimited by ".

The rest is symbols. They can be prefixed by \', or delimited by \" and ".

Quoting is preserved by parsers and printers, and meaningful in some circumstances (eg in STOR, [ starts a vector but \'[ does not).

\ can be used to escape:

  • ' single quote
  • " double quote
  • space
  • \ backslash
  • n newline
  • r carriage return
  • t tab
  • f form feed
  • v vertical tab
  • b backspace
  • [0-9A-F][0-9A-F] arbitrary byte in hex
  • u[0-9A-F][0-9A-F][0-9A-F][0-9A-F] unicode code point in hex (represented in UTF-8)

Simple Textual Object Representation (STOR)

Builds on BEST.

Treats some symbols specially.

  • Unquoted [ starts a vector, a matching unquoted ] ends it; there is no special separator between elements
  • Unquoted ( starts an executable vector, a matching unquoted ) ends it; there is no special separator between elements
  • Unquoted { starts a dict, a matching unquoted } ends it; there is no special separator between key and value or between pairs
  • Unquoted # can be followed by:
    • u undefined
    • n null
    • f false
    • t true
    • e for an elided cycle
    • c comment following (can take any form)
    • b binary following (to indicate arbitrary bytes, distinct from a string)
    • B base64url-encoded binary following
    • f64 64-bit float following
    • f32 32-bit float following
    • f16 16-bit float following
    • i64 64-bit signed integer following
    • i32 32-bit signed integer following
    • i16 16-bit signed integer following
    • i8 8-bit signed integer following
    • u64 64-bit unsigned integer following
    • u32 32-bit unsigned integer following
    • u16 16-bit unsigned integer following
    • u8 8-bit unsigned integer following
    • [0-9]* CBOR-style tag following
  • Unquoted %i where i is an integer is #6 %u8 i (a shorthand for STORM primitives)

Numbers can take the forms 0 +3.14 6.626068e-34 +299_792_458 0xdeadbeef +inf, -inf, nan. Whatever Nim parses today (to be better specified later).

Binary Equal Alternative to Structured Text (BEAST)

Bijection to BEST, a subset of CBOR data streams where every item is a byte string, sometimes but not always tagged.

  • Untagged corresponds to a unquoted symbol
  • Tag 7 corresponds to single-quoted symbol
  • Tag 8 corresponds to double-quoted symbol
  • Tag 9 corresponds to a single-quoted string
  • Tag 10 corresponds to a double-quoted string

More compact than BEST for large binary-heavy data, primarily intended to avoid writing parsers and printers for yet another language in yet another language.