On Mon, Jan 09, 2006 at 07:46:42PM +0000, Stewart Bryant <stbryant@xxxxxxxxx> wrote a message of 73 lines which said: > For example you could say the following in text : [long and > complicated example deleted] For such examples (do note that your example is an illustration of a point and therefore does not need to be normative, like, say, a state diagram), graph people produced several languages which are non-ambiguous, expressed as ASCII and produce nice output. Some even are free (as in free speech and as in free beer). (Unfortunately, none is "standard" in any way, AFAIK.) The one I recommend is Graphviz (http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/graphviz/). An example of Graphviz code for a real network: http://www.seekingfire.com/projects/metanetwork/maps/meta.dot (See http://www.seekingfire.com/projects/metanetwork/info.html for the context) See also: "Managing IP Networks with Free Software" http://www.nanog.org/mtg-0210/ppt/stephen.pdf has a chapter about Graphviz "A Systematic Approach to BGP Configuration Checking" http://www.nanog.org/mtg-0310/pdf/feamster.pdf uses cflow to produce Graphviz ".dot" files. (ACL compilers like Netspoc http://netspoc.berlios.de/ also have an ASCII language to represent networks.) _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf