Re: Some additional obscure questions...

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

HI Bob,

It sort of seems like you have a MIB compiler that has limitations
in its design, and you want the MIB module language to be restricted
so that your MIB compiler could be called compliant? Explaining the
allowed and unallowed forward references sort of seems to complicate
things. Also, if you also have the limitation that OID values must
be written in the form { <name> <number> }, then you cannot support
the following valid MIB module that must use a forward reference:

MY-MIB DEFINITIONS ::=
BEGIN
  IMPORTS
      x FROM ...
     ;
  myMIB MODULE-IDENTITY
     ....
     ::= { y 1 } -- this is { x 1 1 }

  y OBJECT IDENTIFIER ::= { x 1 }
END

In general, I sympathize with Bob, in that the MIB module language has
lots of extra stuff from ASN.1 in it that makes writing a MIB compiler
harder than it needs to be. And maybe if there was an opportunity to
get rid of the extra stuff, like removing the IMPORTing all of the
constructs such as OBJECT-TYPE, etc, I would support it. 

Regards,
/david t. perkins