RE: New Technical Issues RE: WG last call in progress on VLAN/Priority Draft

["Glen Zorn \(gwz\)" <gwz@cisco.com>]

Nelson, David <> supposedly scribbled:

...

>>> (2) The range is defined as 0 .. 2**32-1.
>> 
>> But that's not what it _says_; what it _says_ is "32 bit unsigned
>> value". 
> 
> Is that not what it means?  I had always thought so.

I think it depends upon one's interpretation (which is what this conversation is about).  BTW, the definition of the "Address" data type in RFC 2865 is identical (with the exception that addresses can be signed) to that of "Integer"; what does that mean?  More to the point, it doesn't matter to me whether the attribute data field in question is defined as a string or an integer, since it is neither (or both, depending upon your POV).  

> 
>> Now, everybody who has never written a C program that treated an
>> unsigned long as a string of bits (rather than a whole number) raise
>> their hands ...
> 
> I'm sure that there are lots of such programs, as C has no strong
> data typing.  

As you imply below, neither does RADIUS...

> The substance of this discussion, I think, is whether
> or not the RADIUS protocol should have meaningful model, and
> meaningful data types, 

There are problems with such things, as this conversation illustrates.  One is that one person's "meaningful type" is another's "meaningless distinction", leading to (possibly endless) discussions akin to those medieval ones involving angels and pins ;-); another is the addition of yet another constituency to the debate over protocol extension.  How long would it be before we hear from some server vendor that some perfectly reasonable & extremely useful RADIUS extension cannot be adopted because "my parser won't handle that data type"?

Hope this helps,

~gwz

Why is it that most of the world's problems can't be solved by simply
  listening to John Coltrane? -- Henry Gabriel

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