Processing ASN.1 specifications in a declarative language

Abstract Syntax Notation One ASN.1 is becoming widely used for the specification of CCITT communication protocols. The purpose of ASN.1 is to have a standardized language to express types with and to have a standardized set of rules to transform an instance of one type into a stream of bytes. This stream of bytes can then be sent on a communication channel set up by the lower layers in the stack of communication protocols, e.g. TCP/IP. This way two different applications written in two completely different languages running on different computers with different internal representation of data can exchange instances of structured data types instead of exchanging bytes or even worse bits. This frees the programmer of a great deal of work, since no code has to be written to process the transport format of the data. This paper describes a compiler which is directed towards the declarative language Erlang. In order to use this compiler, familiarity with the language Erlang is essential. The author briefly describes both Erlang and ASN.1