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.
-Matt Matthew Dillon <dil...@backplane.com> :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 majord...@freebsd.org :with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message : To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message