Re: Examples of ASN.1 for SMIng.txt

[Bancroft Scott <baos@oss.com>]

On Tue, 11 Dec 2001, Alessandro Triglia wrote:

> > >>>>> DUBUISSON Olivier writes:
> >
> > Olivier> For example, that would allow SMIng designers to use OSS
> > Olivier> Nokalva's syntax checker that can be freely downloaded from
> > Olivier> their website, that is, use the full power of ASN.1 (or be
> > Olivier> able to use it at any time if needed in the future) and
> > Olivier> benefit of the tools that are in place.
> >
> > A generic ASN.1 tool will only understand ASN.1 and not SMIng. There
> > are several semantic things in the ASN.1 proposal which a generic
> > ASN.1 tool has no chance to understand and check and thus you still
> > need a specific SMIng compiler.
>
> A generic ASN.1 tool will detect many possible errors that are ASN.1 syntax
> errors. Of course, you need a SMIng specific tool to check the semantic
> consistency of the module (for example, whether OIDs are assigned to
> instances in a meaningful way).
>
> One important point to note about the facilities present in current ASN.1 is
> that *every* aspect of the syntax is now rigorously defined, whereas the
> form of ASN.1 that has been used in SMI relied upon an old macro facility
> that was flawed.  As a consequence, there are more kinds of inconsistencies
> that a generic syntax checker can detect now in an ASN.1-based SMIng module,
> than there were for a SMI module.

Note that the ASN.1 information object class notation is far more tightly
wrapped than the ASN.1 macro notation with which you may be familiar.
With information object classes there is far less need (actually, none
comes to mind) to depend on SMIng-specific tools to parse the input and
extract the necessary information so that it is readily utilized.

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