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Re: Some additional obscure questions...
Hi -
> From: "Michael Kirkham" <mikek@muonics.com>
> To: "Randy Presuhn" <randy_presuhn@mindspring.com>
> Cc: <mibs@ops.ietf.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, January 29, 2003 10:47 AM
> Subject: Re: Some additional obscure questions...
...
> I actually did mean just the valuereference. In my poking around various
> discussions about ASN.1 a while back, looking to resolve various grey
> areas in the specs (both SMI and ASN.1 in general), I came across some
> notes from other folks who support this (though I believe it might have
> been an actual ASN.1 discussion, not an SMI discussion. But where the SMI
> is silent, I tend to assume ASN.1 rules apply.)
In this case, RFC 2578 isn't "silent". It's not terribly explicit, but it DOES say:
| 3.2. IMPORTing Symbols
|
| To reference an external object, the IMPORTS statement must be used
| to identify both the descriptor and the module in which the
| descriptor is defined, where the module is identified by its ASN.1
| module name.
The question is whether that last phrase is the definition or an example.
...
> > Though this might be a useful extension to the SMI, I think the language as
> > described in RFC 2578 doesn't support it.
>
> I think the language described in RFC 2578 doesn't really talk about it.
> I'm inclined to believe it's legal in ASN.1, but it's tough to choose
> between "SMI is silent, so follow ASN.1" or "SMI is silent, so ignore
> ASN.1 completely". (These choices would all be much clearer if the SMI
> specs were fully self-contained.)
...
Even though ASN.1 permits it (I just checked the 2002 version,
http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/studygroups/com17/languages/x680-x693_0702.pdf
via http://asn1.elibel.tm.fr/en/standards/index.htm, check the grammar in
the appendixes), the text in RFC 2578 section 3.2 doesn't seem to
support it, though it would be nice to know what the authors think.
Randy