ietf-nntp New wording on article numbers - draft 2

Jack De Winter jack at wildbear.on.ca
Mon Jan 6 12:48:09 PST 1997


At 10:40 AM 1/6/97 -0800, Chris Caputo wrote:
>On Mon, 6 Jan 1997, Brian Kantor wrote:
>> Is that one's-complement, two's-complement, Burroughs mantissa/exponent,
>> or double-precision IEEE-FP bits?
>> The whole world isn't Microsoft/Intel yet, thank God.
>
>On Mon, 6 Jan 1997, Clive D.W. Feather wrote:
>> Because the protocol sends decimal digits, not binary numbers. The actual
>> *value* is limited to 2^32-1 (so if you send 16 digits, the first five will
>> all be zero).
[stuff deleted]
>to:
>
>    Article numbers MUST lie between 1 and infinity inclusive. The
>    client and server SHOULD NOT use leading zeroes in specifying article
>    numbers. In some situations the value zero replaces an article number
>    to show some special situation. The actual article number range
>    supported by an implementation is up to the implementor, but it is
>    intended that the implementor will choose a range that corresponds to
>    modern needs, while maximizing interoperability. 

I don't like not having a range actually... I think that we should have
a default range, say a 32 bit number.  Then, if you would like to do some
sort of addressing that is outside of that range, use the extension
mechanism to define an extra number space.

In any spec'n, I always like to see some sort of default behaviour.

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.



More information about the ietf-nntp mailing list