On Oct 6, 2009, at 12:28 PM, Thomas Narten wrote:
I'm not saying its necessarily a big problem, but it's surely more work (we can argue how much more) to have to go through an entire message to find all the related options before being able to actually process them, compared with just processing them in order, without doing any lookahead.
Nope, I'm still not getting it. How is it more complicated than unpacking the data out of an individual option? Don't you have to go through the entire packet to find that individual option? You already have code that knows how to unpack options, so it seems like it's actually more general to encapsulate the data in options than to define an option format that has to be parsed specially.