[Bro-Dev] Proposing a new type: opaque

[Seth Hall]

On Nov 18, 2012, at 10:26 PM, Matthias Vallentin <vallentin at icir.org> wrote:

> There exists no dedicated handle type in Bro,
> although it wouldn't be complicated to add one.

Yes, having a handle type in Bro would be incredibly handy.

> I am encountering this during the review of Soumya's cardinality counter
> code. Before continuing with the merge, I propose to add a dedicated
> opaque type that has the form:
> 
>    opaque of T

Not sure I like this.  It seems too similar to the current syntax of tables and vectors (I do want to see the vector syntax eventually though).  It looks like T would be a yield value.

In the spirit of keeping the discussion going I'll try and propose an alternate syntax. :)

>    md5_hash_init(idx: opaque of MD5): bool


opaque<MD5>

I'm not sure I like this either because it would be adding new tokens to the parser, but it is a pretty new concept to add to Bro too.

  .Seth


--
Seth Hall
International Computer Science Institute
(Bro) because everyone has a network
http://www.bro-ids.org/