ietf-nntp 32/64 bit question

[Anton Chr. Lauridsen]

I am afraid that I am opening up an old debate, but considering that
this protocol is going to live for quite some years into the future
wouldn't it be appropriate to remove the 32 bit limitation on article
numbers?
 
Paragraph 6 states:
"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."
 
After all nothing prevents servers to remain at a 32 bit value
internally if the implementer does not want to "waste" the additional 4
bytes per message. Newsreaders on the other hand will be dimensioned
according to this limitation. In an not all to distant future megabit
connections and terabyte disks will be commonplace.
 
/anton
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