Your documentation talks about "unencoded" messages and "decoded" messages. Is there a difference between them?

We typically refer to an "unencoded" message as the content of compiler-generated structures before encoding. Correspondingly, a "decoded" message refers to the content of compiler-generated structures after decoding. In general, they are the same, however, there are cases when an encode operation followed by a decode operation changes this content - although semantically it stays the same.

Examples:

• REAL --<DECIMAL>-- value (represented as string) may change from, say, 03140E-3 to 314E-2
• If a value of BIT STRING with named bits is encoded in PER and then decoded, all trailing zero bits are stripped
• the EXER encoding instruction WHITESPACE may change the string value (all white spaces are replaced by a single space, for example); the order of attributes may also be changed.

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