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Re: Diversity and offensive terminology in RFCs

Stewart Bryant <stewart.bryant@gmail.com> Thu, 20 September 2018 11:25 UTC

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Subject: Re: Diversity and offensive terminology in RFCs
From: Stewart Bryant <stewart.bryant@gmail.com>
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Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2018 07:25:45 -0400
Cc: lists@digitaldissidents.org, IETF Discussion <ietf@ietf.org>
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The problem with the many proposed alternative versions of Master/Slave that I have seen over the years, is that they fail to express the technical importance of the absolute relationship between the two entities.

The term master/slave is used when it is technically required that the instruction is executed without equivocation. Indeed in hardware-land, dithering over what to do (metastability) is so catastrophic that many technical measures need to be taken to avoid it.

If all the master-slave flip-flops in the Internet were replaced with do-it-if-I-feel-like-it flip-flops, we would not have an Internet.

In RFC-land we are mirroring the long-standing language of the hardware designers, and having a common terminology that transcends all aspects of logic design seems to me to be a net benefit to the internet as a whole.

Stewart

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