Re: draft minutes from the sming interim:

[Frank Strauss <strauss@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de>]

Hi!

David> [...] a well defined and standard annotation mechanism as
David> part of the language is really very useful. There are several
David> examples of the annotation that exist in commercial products
David> such as the MIB compiler from Epilogue (WindRiver) to assist
David> in generation of code for SNMP agents, and from Novell and HP
David> to provide additional information about notifications.

I agree.


David> The three problems with ASN.1 comments are 
David> 1) use of "--" to delimit comments
David> 2) using the same chars to both start and terminate comments
David> 3) comments cannot be continued over more than one line

I agree just that (1) and (2) is a problem.

David> So, having both C-style comments of:
David>    1) "/*" <comment_text> "*/" and
David>    2) "//" <comment_text> <EOL>
David> would be a welcome change.

I don't think multi-line comments started by a single comment prefix
on the first line, is not required. E.g., writing shell scripts is no
problem for a couple of decades. However, I have no strong opinion
against such multi-line comments.


David> With SMICng there are many compiler directives to control
David> checking.  Because there is no standard way to specify
David> directives, and there are no standard directives, users of
David> SMICng must specify the checking directives on the command line
David> (or environment variable) to SMICng, or create wrapper files
David> containing directives which then include the MIB file. I don't
David> want to modify a MIB file so that it cannot be used by another
David> compiler. This means that the directives are at the module
David> level. It would be much better to specify the directive around
David> the particular construct in a MIB module. This helps the reader
David> of a MIB module by "pointing out" usage that is questionable
David> (maybe for backwards compatibility), or providing a hint for
David> unusual usage.

If you would like to have a parser supporting directives within MIB
files, this can be achieved within comments, without breaking SMI
compatibility. (I'm not saying this is an elegant approach. But IMHO
blowing the language with preprocessor stuff isn't any better.)


 -frank