RE: Aggregate Attributes

["David T. Perkins" <dperkins@dsperkins.com>]

HI,

The following "definition" of naming is really incomplete and
demonstrates a limitation found in C. That is, there can not
in C be two things called foo in a scope and have them be
referenced! In ASN.1 (and in SNMP's SMI) you can.

Also, when we talk about referencing an instance, we have
to specify how an instance is referenced. The mechanisms
are quite different in C compared to SNMP, or in SNMP compared
to CMIP.

Moving on to yet another, but related topic...
A big issue is once you have defined "foo", can via the
access protocol (for example SNMP), GET and SET the value
of a member of foo (such as "x") independently.

Finally, the term "naming" has a special usage in SNMP.
A name in SNMP is an OID value.

On Mon, 1 Oct 2001, Jason, Jamie wrote:
> To me, named simply means that you have a mechanism for referring to the
> attribute group.  Using C as an example:
> 
> typedef struct
> {
> 	int x;
> 	int y;
> } foo;
> 
> foo is now a name that you can use later, for example:
> 
> typedef struct
> {
> 	foo f;
> } bar;
> 
> That was all I had meant by it.
> 
> Jamie
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Frank Strauss [mailto:strauss@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de] 
> > Sent: Friday, September 28, 2001 1:29 AM
> > To: Fred Baker
> > Cc: Jason, Jamie; sming@ops.ietf.org
> > Subject: Re: Aggregate Attributes
> > 
> > 
> > Hi!
> > 
> > >> 1.  Remove the word non-divisible from the description of 
> > attribute 
> > >> groups and replace the description with something like "named, 
> > >> reusable set of attributes that are meaningful together".
> > 
> > Fred> sounds good to me
> > 
> > Is this what you mean (I don't understand the word `named' in 
> > your context)?
> > 
> >    Description: An attribute group is a reusable set of 
> > attributes that
> >       are meaningful together. [...]
> > 
> > This is from the very latest snapshot (as of Fri Sep 28 
> > 10:29:02 CEST 2001).
> > 
> >  -frank

Regards,
/david t. perkins