[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