On Tue, 19 Dec 2000, Jon Knight wrote:
> are on and what the address of their gateway router is. Not exactly what
> I'd call omniscience.
All right, I confess, I'm not perfect in summarising the existing art and
relating to it (yet). I promise to gratefully acknowledge comments such as
these that will doubtless help make the next revision more readable :)
> Surely DNS addresses are more equivalent to the virtual memory
No, in the sense I was arguing about, the DNS hostname points to a physical
host (or interface, etc.), and is therefore a physical address.
> of virtual memory is that it makes it easier for the user (well,
> programmer) by hiding the nasty details of which physical address your
IMHO, hiding is not the primary function of virtual memory addressing,
although it does spin off as a powerful means of security (Section 2.1.3
- security by invisibility).
> code and data live at. The whole point of the DNS is that it makes it
> easier for the user by hiding the nasty details of what IP address you
> need to talk to. And that's without getting into the situations where a
That's high level programming language, not virtual addressing... This
point is particularly brought out in my proposal, as the routing is
literally accomplished as a (distributed) compilation (see attribute
grammar examples in Section 2.4.4, page 28).
> mention URNs at all and yet alot of what it seems to do appears similar to
> the ideas behind the URN efforts of the IETF in the past.
Similar sounding ideas, but no semantics match, really, since the
underlying premises are fundamentally different.
-p.
