To assist the designer in making implementation choices related to the available bandwidth, a tool is required that computes the size of each message in bits. The tool has to read and interpret the format of each message to do so.
A message can best be described by giving the underlying grammar, which uses the following terminals:
id a sequence of letters of length L (1$\leq$L$\leq$256) integer a number between -10 000 and 10 000 (inclusive) "word" the literal string of characters wordA message is defined by the following grammar:
message ::= data
data ::= id ":" type
type ::= record | array | string | enum | range
record ::= "{" data+ "}"
array ::= "array" range "of" type
string ::= "string" "(" integer ")"
enum ::= "(" id-list ")"
id-list ::= id | (id "," id-list)
range ::= "[" integer ".." integer "]"
Note that the message grammar is specified according to the following
notational conventions:
x y sequence: x followed by y x | y choice: x or y x+ repetition: one or more occurrences of x ( ) used for groupingAny two tokens may be separated by an arbitrary amount of white space (blanks, tabs an newlines). White space does not occur within tokens. The (minimal) amount of bits needed to transmit a message can be computed using the following rules:
record : sum of the sizes of the fields
array : size of the component type, multiplied by the number of
elements in the range
string : the length, multiplied by 7 bits
enum : smallest number of bits in which all id's can be
distinguished
range : smallest number of bits in which all range values can be
distinguished
3
year : [1970..2030]
team : {
name : string(14)
members : array [1..3] of {
sex : ( male, female )
name : string(20)
age : [16..30]
}
position : [1..40]
}
jurynames : array [1..3] of string(20)
A "year" message requires 6 bits. A "team" message requires 539 bits. A "jurynames" message requires 420 bits.