Hallo Pascal!

 ASA>> The "serialno" is "eight character hexadecimal
number" according to 
 ASA>> the FTS-0009. Does that mean that spaces are not forbidden? I'm not 
 ASA>> native speaker, but I'm pretty sure they are :-)

 > Maybe my version of FTS-0009 is outdated, but I don't think so.

 > "The serial number may be any eight character hexadecimal number,  as 

 > Note the use of "may be", not "should be". I do
believe it is valid to 
 > use something different.

Well, none of us is an English native speaker, but I think that the
modality "may be" pretty straighforward translates as follows:

Bei der Seriennummer kann es sich um eine beliebige achtstellige
Hexadezimalzahl handeln

and for Alex:

серийным номером может быть любое восьмизначное число

Now we still are left to wonder how to interpret that sentence - modality
is more difficult as one might think at first glance. If you take the stand
that standards are written to clearly define the allowable data, then it is
obvious that random data is not allowable, but certain well-formed data is
allowed, and the "may" word expresses exactly that bit of
allowing: in this field we will allow this kind of data  this kind
of data may be put into this field.

Please also don't forget that "may" (in contrast to
"might" and "could") contains a pretty strong
commanding element, as in "you may go now" (said by the earl to
his butler, meaning "do go now!").

I think that Alex is right in his interpretation, and that your
interpretation would have been right if the sentence would have read
"the serial number could be ..." or "the serial number might
be ...", or "it may be that the serial number is a ...". Now
that sounds funny, doesn't it? And this is so because that's not the type
of statements you will find in standard documents.

Anyway, even if you can defend your line of interpretation, it still is
obvious that lots of people will understand the standard in the way Alex
and I do, so it is very probably that software programmers have understood
it the same way, and that there is software out there which relies on the
serialno being a 8 digit hex number. And we don't want to break that
software, do we?

Regards
Tobias

--- Msged/BSD 6.1.1 (NetBSD/1.4 (alpha))