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Comment by correnos | Hacker News Reader

The "suffix" there is a docs mistake. if you look at the example csexp's on the page the lengths are prefixed. I think that the csexp's of this package are compatible with Rivest's format.

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OK yeah, the 3:bag is easy to see.

With netstrings, it's

    3:bag,

with a comma, which makes it a bit more readable over the wire.

The extra level of Racket quoting was confusing me -- #"" and \" -- it would be nicer if they just wrote exactly what's transmitted over the wire.

And still the page does seem like it's missing a reference. Both Rivest's page and this page seem a bit underdeveloped for a "canonical" format ...

So, "canonical" here means "for a given tree of data this is one unambiguous binary representation for it," which is a useful property for crypto signatures. It does not mean "this is a blessed way to write sexp's", though folks can be forgiven for not realizing that since the docs here don't say much about the when's or why's of use.

Yeah that's one property you want, but "over the network" leaves me wanting a bit more

Namely interoperability between Lisps

See Swank used in Slime

https://github.com/slime/slime/blob/master/swank.lisp

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