3 ms·
Flexible! The first byte tells you how many bytes of addressing you have. Perfect and future proof!
by bombcar 7mo ago
Flexible! The first byte tells you how many bytes of addressing you have. Perfect and future proof!
- jasomill 7mo agoAt best future-resistant. True future-proofing would require representing address length as an arbitrary-precision nonzero unsigned integer. Since allowing a zero-length network address format would serve no purpose other than to pointlessly complicate standards definitions, you could trivially and without loss of generality interpret zero to denote some extended-length address length representation to be defined in a future version of the standard.
- tremon 7mo agoHardware implementations typically do not like variable-size fields. Not just because the total header size becomes unpredictable, but because it means any following fields no longer have a fixed offset, and that complicates parsing.