[chubot]

OK yeah, the 3:bag is easy to see.

With netstrings, it's

    3:bag,

with a comma, which makes it a bit more readable over the wire.

The extra level of Racket quoting was confusing me -- #"" and \" -- it would be nicer if they just wrote exactly what's transmitted over the wire.

And still the page does seem like it's missing a reference. Both Rivest's page and this page seem a bit underdeveloped for a "canonical" format ...

[correnos]

So, "canonical" here means "for a given tree of data this is one unambiguous binary representation for it," which is a useful property for crypto signatures. It does not mean "this is a blessed way to write sexp's", though folks can be forgiven for not realizing that since the docs here don't say much about the when's or why's of use.

[chubot]

Yeah that's one property you want, but "over the network" leaves me wanting a bit more

Namely interoperability between Lisps

[mclide]

See Swank used in Slime

https://github.com/slime/slime/blob/master/swank.lisp