Re: The language

[Juergen Schoenwaelder <schoenw@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de>]

>>>>> David T Perkins writes:

David> There is a small but important change in the words used in the
David> SMI documents and the SMIng documents that needs to be
David> corrected.

Lets see...

David> The SMI documents define the language for writing SNMP MIB
David> modules.  The language is not given a name. The language IS NOT
David> SMI!

David> The SMIng documents modify the text taken from the SMI
David> documents to read that the language defined in the SMIng
David> documents is SMIng.

Your are right. Previous SMI RFCs did not spell out the name of the
language. It is hard to use and refer to a language without a name. So
we fixed this problem by saying clearly what the name of the language
is in section 1.

David> I believe that this is VERY confusing and an appropriate name
David> should be chosen for the new language. 

Looks like you agree with spelling out the name. Good.

David> This language is used to specify object-oriented data
David> definitions of various kinds of management information. The
David> language, at least currently, has a base, and extensions for
David> variations, such as the one defined for SNMP. So, given its
David> usage, maybe the following name should be used for the
David> language: Management Information Object-oriented Data
David> Definition Language or MIOD for the base language and MIODS for
David> supporting SNMP and MIODC for supporting COPS.

Now, you bring up a different topic. You think that SMIng is not
appropriate...

David> I'm sure the creative people on this list can come up with
David> easier to pronounce or cuter names than me.

What about SMIng? Easy to pronounce and a cute name I think. ;-)

Seriously, I fail to see why the name SMIng is broken. Nor do I see a
proposal for something which is good replacement (MIOD, MIODS and
MIODC is just confusing for me). So I suggest to stay with it for now
since there are far more important issue to work on. Once we have gone
through all the other issues, we can go back to debate the name.

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder      Technical University Braunschweig
<schoenw@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de>  Dept. Operating Systems & Computer Networks
Phone: +49 531 391 3289    Bueltenweg 74/75, 38106 Braunschweig, Germany
Fax:   +49 531 391 5936    <URL:http://www.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de/~schoenw/>