> From: Christopher Morrow <[email protected]> > noel can explain a bunch more of this, but.. I think 'name' in his > context isnt 'mail.lcs.mit.edu' but rather: "192.168.2.2" in today'sn > parlance
Yes, I was using 'name' in the very generic sense of 'an identifying label for an object, of no particular syntax or semantics'. As I wrote in http://www.chiappa.net/~jnc/tech/endpoints.txt (Section 2 'Terminology of Naming and Binding'): The terms "object" and "name" are hopefully self-explanatory: it is crucial to differentiate between the thing itself, and any identifier (in the generic sense) by which we refer to it. In this paper, whenever the term "name" is used, unless otherwise explicitly indicated, the meaning given to it is the generic one of "an identifier (of no specific syntax or properties) for an object". Thus, the phrase "name of a host" does *not* refer to an existing system of printable strings (e.g "lcs.mit.edu"), or somesuch; it refers, instead, to the abstract concept of an identifier for a host. (The term "host-name" is used to refer to such printable strings, at the possible risk of some confusion, because it is of long-standing use in the networking community.) This may seem confusing (and some might suggest use of a different term for "name"), but the use of the term "name" in this manner is established in the literature (along with subsidiary terminology such as "namespace"), and while use of the term "name" has perhaps been confused in the networking community, it seems a major distraction to try and tackle that issue now. Noel _______________________________________________ rrg mailing list [email protected] http://www.irtf.org/mailman/listinfo/rrg
