Re: terminology challenge

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

>>>>> Andy Bierman writes:

Andy> I think the WG decided not to attempt to add machine-readable
Andy> elements of procedure, or method routines.  I think the WG
Andy> agreed that we don't want partial inheritance, and only wanted
Andy> single inheritance.  We aren't really providing OO features.

The term partial-inheritance always strikes me. If we allow updates to
SMIng modules, we will see some sort of partial-inheritance in fielded
products.

Andy> I think the types of data structures we are likely to need for
Andy> describing management information are more C-like than C++ like.
Andy> We have examples all over the current MIBs of what should be
Andy> STRUCTs in STRUCTs, UNION of SCALARs, UNION of STRUCTs, ARRAYs
Andy> in ARRAYs, and many other combinations.

Back to the topic: Supporting inheritance means we are using an OO
concept which you find in C++ and Java but not in C. So I think it is
appropriate to use some C++/Java terminology. I also believe that it
is much more appropriate to talk about attributes rather than scalars.

Andy> The "textual footprint" of the GenericCounter UNION is 4:1 or
Andy> 5:1 smaller than SMIv2, without losing any semantics, while
Andy> dramatically improving readability for (32,32/32,64) counter
Andy> tuples. (And it matches the agent representation, making agent
Andy> implementation easy.)

Great. But what does that mean wrt. terminology?

/js