As used in the field of this invention, entities and relationships are special forms of data that are intended to represent information that is useful in the process of designing and writing computer programs. When this information is stored in a retrievable manner it can be used to aid in the development of computer programs. There are various commercial software systems available which are specially designed to manipulate entity/relationship (E/R) data. One of these systems is IBM's Repository Manager (RM). RM is a predominantly host computer based program. Users of RM may enter their data manually using dialog panels or custom programs may be developed to create, update and retrieve the data. RM provides a set of callable functions which can be accessed by other programs. New RM functions can be created by users as well. These callable functions typically require one or more parameters to perform correctly. It is standard practice in the industry for users to have a personal computer or programmable workstation (PWS) which is used to interface with host computer based programs. When the PWS is sharing the workload with the host, the system is said to be "cooperative". Many kinds of data, not only E/R data, are stored in files. These files may be located on either the host or the PWS.
There is a need for efficient ways to encode E/R data, function calls, and file data in a format which can be transmitted between a PWS and another computer.
Packaging data in a data format of self-describing units is known in the art. The use of grammars as a way of precisely defining syntax is also well known. An efficient comprehensive grammar for self-describing data stream of E/R related data which meets the described need is not found in the prior art.