Re: [babel] [netmod] NULL value for uint16

On 14. Sep 2021, at 21:16, Jürgen Schönwälder <j.schoenwaelder@jacobs-university.de> wrote:
> 
> Carsten,
> 
> whatever you do, you will at the end need an extra bit.

Sure.  There are 65537 values, so you need at least 16.000022 bits :-)

> If BBF already
> defined to use -1, so be it.

That works for me and is consistent with the information model in 9046.

What I find not so great is the side effect of going from uint16 to int32.

I don’t see a big difference between
Optional-uint16 = uint16 / -1
and
Optional-uint16 = uint16 / empty

I do not like

Optional-uint16 = int32

> The alternative is to not instantiate the leaf if there is no value
> and to accept that a client can't tell the difference between 'there
> is no value' and 'the value has been suppressed by authorization'.

Interesting.  I wasn’t aware that this cannot be distinguished in YANG.

But an “empty” would be present if it is chosen, no?

Grüße, Carsten

> 
> /js
> 
> PS: You can define a maybe-uint16 type as a union in YANG but yes
>    there is no syntactic sugar to generalize this.
> 
> On Tue, Sep 14, 2021 at 08:36:12PM +0200, Carsten Bormann wrote:
>> On 14. Sep 2021, at 19:17, Jürgen Schönwälder <j.schoenwaelder@jacobs-university.de> wrote:
>>> 
>>> If other data models use an extended integer range and -1 to indicate
>>> a special case, then this may be a strong reason to do the same in the
>>> IETF YANG data model.
>> 
>> Any data model based on FORTRAN certainly will do.
>> Most other data modeling languages by now should have nullable/optional/Maybe types.
>> 
>> Going from the actual data type, uint16, to int32, just to accommodate the “not present” case, strikes me as a mistake.
>> (Which doesn’t mean that you may not want to do this in an implementation, after having validated the input data.)
>> 
>> Grüße, Carsten
>> 
> 
> -- 
> Juergen Schoenwaelder           Jacobs University Bremen gGmbH
> Phone: +49 421 200 3587         Campus Ring 1 | 28759 Bremen | Germany
> Fax:   +49 421 200 3103         <https://www.jacobs-university.de/>
> 
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