Paul Long wrote:
- As I understand it, for some strange reason, because the order of the
members of a SET OF is intended to be un-important the compiler takes it upon itself to sort the values entered into some form of order!!! This seems a waste of time and is a step best avoided by using SEQUENCE OF.
I've never heard of this before. I'll check with Bancroft. Sounds like a bug in the OSS compiler, which by the way we don't use for reasons like this.
[Bancroft's response follows. Apparently there is no reason _not_ to use SET OF, because H.245, and H.225.0, and presumably H.450 use BASIC PER, not CANONICAL PER, so there is no sorting.]
This is true in the case of DER, which mandates this behavior. DER encoders does not take it upon themselves to do this; it is required in order to produce a valid DER encoding. This is also true in the case of CER and the canonical variants of PER. It is not true for the non-canonical variants of PER or for BER.
As far as the OSS ASN.1 Tools go, DER is supported, so here SET OF's are sorted as required. The OSS ASN.1 Tools at this time does not support the canonical variants of PER, so no such sorting occurs for PER. Since all the sorting algorithms are in place for DER, it is easy to provide canonical PER support if it is required.
-- Paul Long___________________________http://www.cmpu.net/public/plong Smith Micro Software, Inc.__________http://www.smithmicro.com/