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Or it could be a placeholder for future expansion and while it would do nothing now, in the future it might break things if you've ignored the documentation.
by technothrasher 3y ago
Or it could be a placeholder for future expansion and while it would do nothing now, in the future it might break things if you've ignored the documentation.
- bluGill 3y agoIf you design a protocol without at least one field reserved for future expansion you are a bad engineer. Generally I would call this the protocol version number field, but there are other options. The important thing is there is some field that currently has a defined range, but can get an a larger range in the future and you check that field and abort if it is out of range. I also recommend a second field called protocol ID which is set to a known random value (your wife's birthday) so that if someone gets an unknown message if they see that value they can guess what the protocol is.