Re: comments on draft-ietf-sming-reqs-03.txt

[Jon Saperia <saperia@jdscons.com>]

> Hi!
> 
> Jon> [...] I do not plan on spending a lot of time on these issues. I just
> Jon> wanted to be a good citizen an express my views one more time.
> 
> I agree, that we should not waste time on this semicolon discussion,
> at least not at this point in time. 
> 
> What's important *now* are the requirements and their classifications.
> 
Joel, just posted a note that said quite well what part of the disconnect may 
be. It seems to me that we do not have an agreed set of problems to be solved. 
As a result we are all thinking about our favorites from making it better for 
parsers to my favorite aggregate objects which may not matter to many.

> The semicolon is of course not a requirement. But in my opinion the
> prerequisites for an easy and unambiguous development of parsers is a
> requirement, since we are faced these days with lots of buggy SMI
> modules due to the fact that for a long time of more than 5 years
> developers didn't have MIB compilers of that precision that we are all
> accustomed to by C and Java compilers. I don't want to repeat such a
> pain.
> 
>  -frank
> 
Frank, on this specific point, I think we still disagree. The problems with 
[bad] SMI modules is that they are far less the result of buggy compilers and 
much more the result of poor design and implementation. This is due in part to 
the junior level of people that work on them in most companies and the 
relatively low priority the work receives. A better compiler does not solve 
much.

BTW, when I run development projects, I often ask for several compilers (c or 
c++, and increasingly Java) to be used. The reason is that each has strengths 
and weaknesses even in something that has been around for a long time like c.  
gcc, and the compilers from Sun and HP have historically picked up different 
issues. So while I might agree that an improvement in mib compilers would be 
nice, it almost does not register on my list of important things. This is 
largely due to the fact that in the many companies I have worked for and the 
ones I current worth with as part of my consulting business, compilers are 
never the issue.

Thanks,
/jon
--

Jon Saperia		     saperia@jdscons.com
			     Phone: 617-744-1079
			     Fax:   617-249-0874
			     http://www.jdscons.com/