"Тони Стоев | Toni Stoev" <[email protected]> writes:
> Why so, what is the gain? A promising example: use of arbitrary-length > numbers in network addresses. Node addresses can be adequate in size to > fit local needs, not squeezing the universal expansion of the network. Just to add a bit to what Ian said, please note that methods of writing down arbitrary-length numbers in binary are well-understood and have been well-understood for quite some time. Lack of an algorithm is not why network addresses use fixed-width fields. Rather, the problem is that arbitrary-length numbers are much slower because you don't know exactly how long the packet header is going to be and therefore cannot write highly-optimized software (generally accompanied by highly-optimized hardware) for routing packets when you use variable-length packet headers. The performance penalty would be prohibitive for Internet routers. This was a topic of considerable discussion during the IPv6 design, since of course everyone would have preferred to use arbitrary-length addresses had it been possible. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
