MOF14 — Primitive data types usage in the MOF Model.

In MOF 1.3, the Model contains references to the following primitive (IDL)
data types: boolean, long, unsigned long, any, string and TypeCode. Some
of these are 'typedef'd.

In MOF 1.4, the status of the primitive types is as follows:

boolean – required
long – 32 bit signed integers – required (for MultiplicityType)
unsigned long – 32 bit unsigned integers – not required
(its use in MOF 1.3 was a typo ... )
any – maybe required for Constant, Constraint and Tag.
TypeCode – not required
string – required, but see below.

There are a couple of loose ends though:

1) The "any" type would need to be a 5th standard PrimitiveType. It has
been suggested that we can use a string type to represent the 'value'
field of Constant, the 'values' field of Tag and the 'expression' field
of Constraint. Tags and Constraints are straightforward, but using
a string to represent a Constant value would entail defining standard
concrete (string) syntaxes for the kinds of values allowed for Constants.

Proposal: Replace all occurrences of 'any' in the MOF Model with a 16 bit
UTF string type.

Proposal: Adopt the IDL syntax for integer, floating point and wide string
literals with minor modifications as required. (It would be a good idea
to use an encoding that works with 8 bit character sets ... )

2) In MOF 1.3, "string" is used for various things such as NameType,
AnnotationType, DependencyKind and FormatType along with the type
of 'tagId'. Note that this is an 8 bit string type. Apparently
this causes problems for some meta-modellers. At any rate, now
would be a good time to start supporting international character
sets in meta-models.

Proposal: Change all 'string' types in the MOF Model to a 16 bit UTF
string type.

Proposal: Remove all cosmetic typedefs.

see above