RE: Floating point usage in a MIB module

["Wijnen, Bert (Bert)" <bwijnen@lucent.com>]

Well.... we should realize (accept?) that the base protocol
exchanges Bandwith for these links also in IEEE floating point
format. So we could decide that we rather see it as an integer,
but the underlying instrumentation seems to be floating point. 
So ...

Thanks,
Bert 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sharon Chisholm [mailto:schishol@nortelnetworks.com]
> Sent: donderdag 29 januari 2004 18:08
> 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 
> 
>