ietf-nntp New wording on article numbers - draft 2

Jack De Winter jack at wildbear.on.ca
Sun Jan 5 22:36:08 PST 1997


At 05:29 AM 1/6/97 +0000, Clive D.W. Feather wrote:
>Chris Caputo said:
>>>     Article numbers MUST lie between 1 and 4 294 967 295 inclusive. The
>>>     client and server SHOULD NOT use leading zeroes in specifying article
>>>     numbers, and MUST NOT use more than 16 digits. In some situations the
>>>     value zero replaces an article number to show some special situation.
>> What was the reasoning on limiting the length to 16 digits?  It seems
>> arbitrary.
>
>It was. Putting *a* limit means that it's possible to plan things like
>buffer sizes. If we forbad leading zeroes, that would give an effective
>limit of 10, but I expected that to create too many squarks. So I picked a
>round number.

Can I ask a simple question then... why 16 digits (as in decimal) as
opposed to a given number of bits?

regards,
Jack
-------------------------------------------------
Jack De Winter - Wildbear Consulting, Inc.
(519) 576-3873		http://www.wildbear.on.ca/

Author of SLMail(95/NT) (http://www.seattlelab.com/) and other great products.



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