Hi, > What we are seeing is increasing use of fully automated tools > that don't > have humans identifying which octets are MIB and which are > code. You can't > do that with plain ASCII.
MIB modules may be a bad example for you to use. All MIB modules start with a BEGIN character string and end with an END character string. Plain ASCII works perfectly well for this purpose. Binary formatted documents, such as MS-Word and PDF, require much more work from the tools to find those BEGIN and END statements. David Harrington [EMAIL PROTECTED] > -----Original Message----- > From: Brian Rosen [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Tuesday, January 10, 2006 8:09 AM > To: 'Theodore Ts'o' > Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; 'John C Klensin'; 'Marshall > Eubanks'; ietf@ietf.org > Subject: RE: Alternative formats for IDs > > It's trivial for a human, but not for a computer. > Many things trivial for humans are not trivial for computers. > > The kind of harvesting you are talking about is trivial for a > human from any > format as long as your editor can paste while losing formatting. > > What we are seeing is increasing use of fully automated tools > that don't > have humans identifying which octets are MIB and which are > code. You can't > do that with plain ASCII. > > Your statement that the IETF is getting populated with people > who don't code > is true. It's a fact, and we need to adapt. Most (but not > all) of the > people who design protocols these days don't code; they have > people who work > with them who do. Part of that is unavoidable. The part I > regret, which > could be avoided, is the loss of "running code" that we used > to care about. > Another thread. > > Brian > > -----Original Message----- > From: Theodore Ts'o [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Monday, January 09, 2006 11:37 PM > To: Brian Rosen > Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; 'John C Klensin'; 'Marshall > Eubanks'; ietf@ietf.org > Subject: Re: Alternative formats for IDs > > On Sat, Jan 07, 2006 at 03:18:08PM -0500, Brian Rosen wrote: > > Any format can be used for any purpose, but it might be > time to fully > stand > > up to requirements to harvest data, and to recognize (as I > did on another > > side thread), that reading is getting harder and harder for > ASCII. It may > > be a decent archive format still, but I'm not sure it's > going to stay that > > way. > > Huh? "Harvesting data" from ASCII, in terms of pulling out MIB's to > be fed into MIB compiler, or reference C code for algorithms like MD5 > (RFC 1321) is *trivial* under ASCII. Last I checked, C compilers and > MIB compilers still use ASCII text as input, and not Word documents or > XML documents. Maybe part of what is going on is that IETF is getting > populated with people who aren't close to coding as much as before? > You can get perfectly decent text editors for all operating systems, > even Windows. > > And even Word can import text (i.e., plain ASCII) documents Just Fine. > > - Ted > > > _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
