Handling a multi-value attribute question

[Peter Schober]

* Mike Flynn <shibbolethlynda at yahoo.com> [2012-12-06 16:20]:
> But, I am curious - Why is givenName a multi-value attribute?  We
> have nickname...  Was there a specific scenario that created a need
> for multiple values for these?

According to http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4519#section-2.12 it came
from ITU-T Recommendation X.520.
Bear in mind that X.500 was about an interconnected global directory
service ("/the/ directory"; which never happend) and /search/ was an
important aspect of that: You'd want to be able to search for Joe
as well as Joseph, so the data structures would need to accomodate for
storing and searching multiple values.
-peter