- The only reasonable means of mirroring the data layout.
The '{}' delimiters mark the extent of the binary writes.
The primitives 'label' and 'scalar' are directly supported and correspond
to known byte widths.
Using "List<scalar>" was a bad choice, since this triggers unpleasant
tokenizing behaviour. Instead use 'scalars' as a provisional placeholder
to indicates a list of scalar values. However, there is currently no
support for actually handling lists of scalars, for several reasons:
* The information is not available at compile-time.
The cloud or parcel must be queried. And it must be guaranteed
that this value is consistent for the entire cloud.
* Binary output of lists is currently not great for determining the
the encoded width:
- A zero-size list is a single '0'.
- The leading size is a non-constant number of digits.
- There are prefix/suffix newlines need to be tagged and
skipped.
The special '*' (glob) token indicates that the remaining content
has a dynamic variable length and nothing reasonable can be known
about their sizes. This is exemplified by the collision records.
ed2017aa21