Re: [9fans] telnet vs. godaddy whois

[Charles Forsyth]

to be fair, this is one reason a few programming languages have non-trivial 
validation suites,
much of which check probable or historical misunderstandings,
and those suites are usually too small.  it takes a fair amount of 
back-and-forth through
the natural language text to build a supposedly complete specification.
the TCP/IP specification is tricky, partly because it suggests a programming 
interface as well,
which isn't quite the one that most people use today.  it's not just us: 
RFC1144 notes
        `PUSH' is a curious anachronism considered indispensable by certain 
members of the Internet
        community.  Since PUSH can (and does) change in any datagram, an
        information preserving compression scheme must pass it explicitly.