Re: should guidelines say something about NOT using IMPLIED?

["Randy Presuhn" <randy_presuhn@mindspring.com>]

Hi -

> From: "C. M. Heard" <heard@pobox.com>
> To: "Mreview (E-mail)" <mreview@ops.ietf.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, February 05, 2003 4:09 PM
> Subject: Re: should guidelines say something about NOT using IMPLIED?
...
> 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:
...
> > 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.
...

IMPLIED does *NOT* put strings in alphabetical order, at
least not for any language I can think of.  For example, IMPLIED
produces this ordering:

   Apple
   Zebra
   aardvark

In other languages the results are even more contrary to
human expectations, so "alphabetical order" is *not*
one of the benefits of using IMPLIED.

Randy