Re: Examples of ASN.1 for SMIng.txt

[Olivier DUBUISSON <Olivier.Dubuisson@francetelecom.com>]

Andy Bierman wrote:
> 
> I want the best notation we can get for the least amount
> of training and development costs. 

So do I.

> I don't think the SMIv2
> syntax is very good, but it is familiar, and it's what we
> picked many years ago. 

As far as macro instances go, the only difference is to add curly
braces around them.

> I don't want to make a lot of gratuitous
> changes to the syntax -- I don't like upper case DESCRIPTION
> better than lower case, but some things you just have to get
> as correct as possible the first time.

If you use the ASN.1 mode for Emacs that is freely available from
<http://asn1.elibel.tm.fr/tools/emacs/> (and can be used on a lot of
operating systems), the lower/upper-casing will be done automatically.

We could even have a specific variant for SMIng.

> I don't want to use ASN.1 because I think it's difficult to read,

As people already said, this is subjective.

> difficult to write, not widely used  (either by a large number
> of people or a significant number of technical domains), and

A lot of (but not all) application domains are presented at:
http://asn1.elibel.tm.fr/uses/
Do you really think that a specific notation for SMIng can compete?
As far as the number of people, there are a lot of new people that subscribe
each week to the mailing-list of the ITU-T ASN.1 Project
<http://www.itu.int/itu-t/asn1>.

> no substantial body of tools (free or commercial).

A lot of links are provided at: http://asn1.elibel.tm.fr/links/#tools

> Do you have a reason why we SHOULD use ASN.1, other than "it's ASN.1"?

It meets most of the SMIng requirements. (And the authors of the
contribution have already given a lot of reasons on this reflector.)

Olivier