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From: Jim Fleming <JimFleming@unety.net>
To: "'Bill Fenner'" <fenner@parc.xerox.com>,
        "terry@lambert.org"
	 <terry@lambert.org>
Cc: "hackers@freebsd.org" <hackers@freebsd.org>,
        "JimFleming@unety.net"
	 <JimFleming@unety.net>
Subject: RE: Check IP Version
Date: Mon, 8 Apr 1996 18:05:24 -0500
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On Monday, April 08, 1996 5:24 PM, Bill Fenner[SMTP:fenner@parc.xerox.com] wrote:
@>Political pansies.
@
@Realists.  "This IPv6 shit breaks my toaster, I will continue to use IPv4
@since it works just fine"
@
@It'd be nice to say "Sorry, your IPv4 stack is broken", but it's always
@the newcomer that gets blamed for the troubles.  "But it works without
@the new thing, so the new thing must be broken."
@

If people designed processors the way some people implement protocols
we would have a situation where everything works until you try to add two
numbers greater than some arbitrary limit. I am not sure that the solution
in that case would be to switch to floating point because large integers are
broken. Especially, when it is not that hard to have an implementation match
the specification.

Of course in C+@nIP (or IPv8 as some call it)...we only use the single high bit
of the IP version field as a flag. The other three bits of the version field are
borrowed for other purposes along with the Header Length and Checksum fields.
This does not exactly follow the "spec" but it provides us with the flags we
need to grow our way out of the suppsed IP address shortage.

--
Jim Fleming
UNETY Systems, Inc.
Naperville, IL 60563

e-mail: JimFleming@unety.net