Brian E Carpenter allegedly wrote, On 12/11/08 3:50 PM:
> On 2008-12-12 04:52, Scott Brim wrote:
>> RJ Atkinson allegedly wrote:
>>> So I think it is important to have very crisp definitions all around
>>> (forwarding vs bridging; identity vs location, et cetera)  So I try
>>> to be consistent and precise with my use of terms.  However, other
>>> folks' mileage differs on some/all of these issues, as is true with
>>> many other issues discussed in the Routing RG.  I think we'd all be
>>> better off with some agreed upon crisp definitions for various terms,
>>> but past attempts to do that in this RG have not succeeded.
>> Just to follow up on this part ...
>>
>> What you need crisp definitions for is how things are used, in protocols
>> acting on packets.  Therefore you could ask
>>
>>   "Is this field in the packet an identifier or is it a locator"
>>
>> but you've seen how get into discussion of whether something can be a
>> locator here but not there, and so on.  It's more useful to ask
>>
>>   "Is this field in the packet used for identification?  Is it used by
>>   forwarding?"
>>
>> You could answer "yes" and "yes" or "not in this scope".
> 
> Bingo! Whether a particular binary string has value as a locator
> or not depends entirely on the scope in which it's examined.
> If the flat lookup table in a bridge or switch decides which
> outbound interface to use on the basis of a MAC address, then it's
> being used as a locator at that particular point, even though it
> may have been used as an identifier during the ARP or ND process.
> 
>    Brian

"being used as" ... that's what I was trying to say when I said the
important thing was the function using it.
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