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.