Well, I miswrote slightly - the fact is that an implementation has to
first check if the address is any of the non-global-unicast cases, and that
involves doing a sequence of matches which involve the bits
Formerly Known as the Format Prefix (not just 3 of them of course).
I think the new text makes this harder to understand. It doesn't change
what implementors should do.
Feel free to ignore my comment if nobody else has the same reaction.
Brian
Erik Nordmark wrote:
>
> > I also think that abolishing the term "format prefix" is obfuscation. The
> > fact is that the leading bits of an address *are* a format prefix and
> > implementors *will* look at those bits before processing an address. Why
> > obscure that fact?
>
> Brian,
> It is exactly this that we want to avoid - implementors thinking that they
> need to inspect the first 3 bits of the addresses.
> There is no need to do this and we need to reduce the probability that
> implementors hard-code any knowledge of any leading 3 bit combinations
> since it will make it harder to use the other 15/16th of the address space
> in the future.
>
> Erik
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