RE: Floating point usage in a MIB module

["Harrington, David" <dbh@enterasys.com>]

Hi,

I think we should continue this historic practice. Applications know how
to work with this approach already.

I also have a concern about whether this IEEE Standard is readily
available to mib developers.

dbh 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sharon Chisholm [mailto:schishol@nortelnetworks.com] 
> Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2004 12:08 PM
> To: Mreview (E-mail)
> Subject: RE: Floating point usage in a MIB module
> 
> 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 
> 
> 
>