On 07/05/2013 02:10, l(_dot_)wood(_at_)surrey(_dot_)ac(_dot_)uk wrote:
http://labs.apnic.net/blabs/?p=309
an excellent detective story on badly-written, poorly edited, standards track
RFCs leading to interop problems. Enjoy.
I don't that is quite right. The problem in this case is not to do
with linguistic quality. It's due to a lack of formal verification
among a set of interacting and cross-area RFCs. (And the problem
is wider, because there are two distinct places in IETF standards
where ABNF for the text representation of IPv6 addresses can be
found.) This is a case where no amount of language editing would
have helped. Actually I used it a couple of months ago in a
discussion with some experts on formal verification, and they rather
liked it as a poster child for the need for formal methods in SDOs.
Brian