Purpose of RLE encoding?

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• StephanTual London, EnglandMember, Moderator Posts: 1,282 mod

  January 2014

  Object serialisation is a common paradigm in programming languages, when complex data structures need to be stored or transmitted then reconstructed for processing.
  
  You may have heard of XML or JSON, RLP (detailed here: http://wiki.ethereum.org/index.php/RLP) is another way.

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• salhadaar Member Posts: 26 ✭

  January 2014

  Seems like it takes up a lot less space than a JSON string which is the most important thing IMO. As long as there are libraries for it so that third party software programs can read the blockchain.

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• StephanTual London, EnglandMember, Moderator Posts: 1,282 mod

  January 2014

  @salhadaar - absolutely, while Vitalik didn't explain the why behind the choice of RLP for serialization, I suspect it's space-efficiency driven.

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• FrictionlessCoin Member Posts: 6 ✭

  January 2014

  There has to be a reason beyond just compression. Anyone have an answer better the ones so far?
  

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• kershy Member Posts: 46 ✭

  March 2014 edited March 2014

  What is RLP the acronym for?
  I could only find: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Link_Protocol
  and Resource Location Protocol (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc887)

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• StephanTual London, EnglandMember, Moderator Posts: 1,282 mod

  March 2014

  @kershy - https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/[English]-RLP

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• kershy Member Posts: 46 ✭

  March 2014 edited March 2014

  Where does it explain the acronym? That page only seems to explain how it works....

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• w0bb1yBit5 Member Posts: 17 ✭

  March 2014

  kershy: the OP quote above gives the definition: Recursive Length Prefix (RLP) encoding.
  

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• kershy Member Posts: 46 ✭

  March 2014

  Ah I missed that... sorry. Thanks

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• StephanTual London, EnglandMember, Moderator Posts: 1,282 mod

  April 2014

  See http://hidskes.com/blog/2014/04/02/ethereum-building-blocks-part-1-rlp/ for an excellent introduction to RLP.

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