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From: Mikhail Teterin <mi@kot.ne.mediaone.net>
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Subject: Re: sysctl oids (was: Re: kvm question)
In-Reply-To: <199901242304.PAA05248@apollo.backplane.com> from Matthew Dillon at "Jan 24, 1999 03:04:42 pm"
To: current@FreeBSD.ORG
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 1999 18:28:28 -0500 (EST)
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Matthew Dillon once stated:

=    This is a silly argument.  Unless the operation in question
=    needs to be run a thousand times a second, a string is just
=    fine as a lookup mechanism.  Duh.  Besides, you can always 
=    cache the translation.

I'll agree, that todays hardware turns this into a matter of taste.
Your argument will not remain smart for too long, however, either.
Pretty soon you may need to change "thousand" into "million" and so
on. Likewise, my argument was not at all silly back when my kernel was
smaller then 700Kb. My taste did not change since...

	-mi

=:Julian Elischer once stated:
=:
=:=> Nonsense. There are plenty of contexts in which a number makes far
=:=> more sense than a name -- pretty much anything in any network stack
=:=> other than Chaosnet, for example. If any of us ever make good on the
=:=> threat of SNMP integration, having fixed numerical identifiers will
=:=> be a requirement.
=:
=:=SNMP will require a translation layer anyhow.. numbers cannot and
=:=should not be used. They are not easily maintained in the face of
=:=multiple external modules being dynamically loadable.
=:
=:=That is at least my opinion.. you may and do disagree. I guess you will
=:=say that numbers are just as dynamic, etc.etc. well I just think that
=:=in the REAL WORLD, as opposed to the theoretical world, names (which
=:=require no co-ordination between authors), are a better choice than
=:=numbers, which require some central naming authority.
=:
=:Pardon my intrusion, but I strongly dislike the very thought about
=:my computer looking-up the same string more then once or twice. If it
=:counts -- I'd take a number over a string anytime anywhere other
=:then in a documentation.
=:
=:	-mi
=:
=:To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
=:with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
=:
=


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