It's the concept of well-known ports that's broken, not the provision for 65K
ports.
offhand I don't see why we need two kinds of names for services,
because that creates the need for a way to map from one constant to
another - and that mapping causes failures which seem entirely
unnecessary.
I do see the need to allow applications to talk to non-default service
names (say for testing or other special cases) but that's a
separate issue.
regarding service names, a bit string should be fine, as long as it's
not restricted to some short length. 16 bits is not enough in the long
term.
I don't have much of a problem with services named using character
strings either, except that these days such discussions inevitably
bring up internationalization issues that I'd rather avoid.
most of this is probably moot as I doubt we have the luxury of starting
from scratch. but in terms of where we want to be, I think it makes
more sense to extend the port # space than to insist that everyone use
a separate and less reliable means of mapping between character service
names and port #s.
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