RE: Floating point usage in a MIB module

["Sharon Chisholm" <schishol@nortelnetworks.com>]

Hi

I think the first question is do we want to encourage floating point
numbers? I think historically we have tended to go with selecting the
correct units to prevent floating points. As in using bits per micro seconds
as appose to seconds.

Sharon

-----Original Message-----
From: Wijnen, Bert (Bert) [mailto:bwijnen@lucent.com] 
Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2004 11:45 AM
To: Mreview (E-mail)
Subject: Floating point usage in a MIB module


MIB Doctors, do we believe that this is a proper
way to express a 32-bit floating point number?

  TeLinkBandwidth ::= TEXTUAL-CONVENTION
    DISPLAY-HINT "d"
    STATUS       current
    DESCRIPTION
       "This type is used to represent link bandwidth in bps. This
        value is represented using a 32 bit IEEE floating point
        format."
    REFERENCE
       "IEEE Standard for Binary Floating-Point Arithmetic,
        Standard 754-1985"
    SYNTAX       Unsigned32

I think that at least the DISPLAY-HINT seems weird here, no? Now, the author
may have done so because of a warning he got if there was no display hint.

But is Unsigned32 the best way? Or would an OCTET STRING SIZE(4) be better
with a DISPLAY HINT of "1d.3d" or something like that. I don't think we have
a way to properly provide a DISPLAY-HINT for a float, do we?

Thanks,
Bert