This is Fudge-C, a C implementation of the Fudge message encoding system. Full
details of Fudge, including the specification can be found at

    http://fudgemsg.org/

In brief: Fudge is a hierarchical, typesafe, binary, self-describing message
encoding specification.

    Hierarchical:
        Fudge messages aren't just a flat structure, they can be nested,
        creating larger, more complex data structures.

    Typesafe:
        Individual fields in a Fudge message are provided with their type data
        encoded, so that you can extract data safely.

    Binary:
        Fudge encoded data is binary, making it much smaller than text-based
        representations like XML or JSON.

    Self-Describing:
        Fudge messages contain metadata about the fields encoded (like a name
        or an ordinal), meaning that you can manipulate them without knowing
        the schema in advance.

    Message:
        Fudge was originally designed for encoding data to pass in a Message
        Oriented Middleware system, and so are more suited to the types of
        objects likely to be transmitted over a network connection than to a
        pure streaming mode.

The Fudge-C implementation is a lightweight, simple, native implementation of
this specification. By its nature it lacks the complex type inference
functionality of the Fudge-Java and Fudge-Net implementations. However it
fully supports all transport types and opaque "blocks of bytes" for custom
type instances. It has no external library dependencies and requires only a C
compiler and a tool chain.

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Copyright (C) 2009
Vrai Stacey <vrai.stacey@gmail.com>

This file is part of Fudge-C.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at
 
    http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
     
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.

Fudge specification description taken from the Fudge Messaging website,
Copyright (C) 2009, OpenGamma Inc.