> > My wild guess is if we'd just waited a little bit longer to formalize > > IPng we'd've more seriously considered variable length addressing with > > a byte indicating how many octets in the address even if only 2 > > lengths were immediately implemented (4 and 16.) > > Actually, that got heaved over the side fairly early in the IPng discussion, > because nobody who was building silicon last century wanted to > deal with arbitrary-length addresses. The IPv4 header had source and > destination addresses on 4-byte boundaries for good reasons which > still held true when we did the IPv6 headers.
It's rather interesting how parsing of variable length addresses was thought to be way too complicated - while parsing of IPv6 extension header chains of unknown length was okay. Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sth...@nethelp.no
