Re: should guidelines say something about NOT using IMPLIED?

["C. M. Heard" <heard@pobox.com>]

On Wed, 5 Feb 2003, Wijnen, Bert (Bert) wrote:
> > > - Say something about NOT using IMPLIED ?
> > 
> > I don't remember why this was considered evil, and
> > I know that some people don't agree that it us.
> > Can someone refresh my memory?  [OPEN]
> > 
> 
> >From RFC3216:
>   4.1.36 Deprecate Use of IMPLIED Keyword
> 
>    Type: fix
> 
>    From: WG
> 
>    Description: The SMIng SNMP mapping must deprecate the use of the
>       IMPLIED indexing schema.
> 
>    Motivation: IMPLIED is confusing and most people don't understand it.
>       The solution (IMPLIED) is worse than the problem it is trying to
>       solve and therefore for the sake of simplicity, the use of IMPLIED
>       should be deprecated.

This tells me only that the SMIng folks thought it was bad ... but I
still don't understand why, since I have not been following that
work.  And evidently I'm not the only MIB Doctor with such doubts:

On Fri, 17 May 2002, Dave Thaler wrote:
[ in response to review comments on the MALLOC-MIB ]
> 20) Bert Wijnen:
> > - I see the use of IMPLIED. As you may know, in the SMIng WG, the
> >   consensus seems to be that IMPLIED was a bad idea. There is
> >   the feeling that we should deprecate or obsolete the use of 
> >   the IMPLIED keyword. So maybe you want to consider to not use
> >   it...!! I do understand the sorting issue. Not sure how
> >   important the sorting issue is.
> 
> The sorting issue is that with IMPLIED, strings appear in 
> alphabetical order, which is how humans expect things to look.
> Without IMPLIED, strings appear in order by length, and then
> alphabetically within a given length.
> 
> I don't understand why it's a bad idea.  No change, since you
> didn't seem adamant about it.

So, before I put anything in, I'd like to hear some general
agreement that a bad on IMPLIED is a good idea.  I'm somewhat
gun-shy about banning things I don't understand.  Such is the
way CLRs are born.  If someone feels strongly that IMPLIED should
be banned (more properly, NOT RECOMMENDED, since we are not
rewriting the SMI), it would be really helpful if the advocate
would draft some proposed text (and suggest a good place for
it in the document).

Thanks,

Mike