UBF

Universal Binary Format

A binary (better ;-) alternative" to XML. http://www.sics.se/~joe/ubf/site/home.html

Good description in paper http://www.erlang.se/workshop/2002/Armstrong.pdf

remarks on that paper

Architectur description in section 3 reveals that ubf also is based on the idea of checked ProcessStep's. As such ubf's contract checker can be understood as a special case of the 'function' producing the 'reply' element for AskemosDVM. The AskemosDVM is more general as 'function' a) also produces the new state and message and b) can create several messages at once.

ubf describes a consise data format and validation language. Both are stack based (highly similar to FORTH?).

future: it might be worth to add pure checking support (as suggested in http://www.softeyes.net:9080/~jerry/Askemos-NODe2002.pdf slide 15) for the AskemosDVM based on ubf.

Related quoting http://lambda.weblogs.com/discuss/msgReader$5185 : The Erlang Bit Syntax extends pattern matching to (de)constructing chunks of binary data, such as the bit-encoded headers in network protocols and file formats. It's an amazingly handy language extension.

The Bit Syntax is a standard part of Erlang now, though it doesn't have all the features of the prototype. For details see The Bit Syntax - The Released version, or Erlang Extensions since 4.4.

The binary-types package or Common Lisp implements a similar extension.