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Re: [ldapext] X.509, RFC4523, RFC3641, big Ints

Steven Legg wrote:
As an aside, I really wish we were using hex for the canonical Integer representation; then any system could manipulate integers of any size independently of any native word size... 

It would always be possible to define hexadecimal as an alternative
representation for integers in GSER, perhaps distinguished from decimal
by a leading 0x .

I think this is an absolute necessity. In particular, the ASN.1 Integer type does not exclude negative numbers, but it's impossible to determine where the sign bit resides since the word size isn't specified. So the only safe thing to do is to treat it all as unsigned hex.
--
-- Howard Chu
Chief Architect, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com
Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
Chief Architect, OpenLDAP http://www.openldap.org/project/

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