Another nit

Garrett.Wollman@uvm.edu Mon, 14 June 1993 19:43 UTC

Date: Mon, 14 Jun 1993 15:42:40 -0400
Sender: ietf-archive-request@IETF.CNRI.Reston.VA.US
From: Garrett.Wollman@uvm.edu
Message-Id: <9306141942.AA15849@sadye.emba.uvm.edu>
To: PIP mailing list <pip@thumper.bellcore.com>
Subject: Another nit

It would be nice if the punctuation used in specifying PIP addresses
were chosen from a set not already commonly used by various languages
and computer systems as list separators.  In particular, I think the
comma is a bad choice.

So I would rule out the following characters which have difficulties:

,	used in Western languages
;	used in Western languages
:	used in UNIX foocap files
<>$#^!&	have special meaning to many UNIX shells
*()'"`\	ditto
|[]{}?	ditto

> would have been really nice, but it suffers from ``the UNIX
Problem''.  So, what remains are:

@	not commonly used
%	not commonly used
-	reasonable
_	reasonable
=	used in many programming languages
+	reasonable
/	reasonable

Of these the most satisfactory from the networking standpoint is `-',
since it is already used in similar contexts (e.g., Ethernet
addresses); but it would be easy to confuse it and `.', so this may
not be a good idea.  For mnemonic significance, `/' seems to be a good
choice (although users of non-UNIX systems wouldn't see it).

Thoughts?  I know it sounds trivial, but this /is/ something we have
to think about.  (I'd also like to get rid of the hex and replace it
with decimal, for familiarity's sake if nothing else.)

-GAWollman

--
Garrett A. Wollman   | Shashish is simple, it's discreet, it's brief. ... 
wollman@emba.uvm.edu | Shashish is the bonding of hearts in spite of distance.
uvm-gen!wollman      | It is a bond more powerful than absence.  We like people
UVM disagrees.       | who like Shashish.  - Claude McKenzie + Florent Vollant

Another nit Garrett.Wollman
Re: Another nit Scott_Brim
Re: Another nit Paul Francis--formerly Tsuchiya