Re: Thinking differently about names and addresses

[Keith Moore <moore at cs.utk.edu>]

> > > A system doesn't have to provide mechanisms to look up mappings
> > > from<any-name> to <any-other-name> to be useful; 
> > 
> > agreed.  but it does need to provide such mechanisms in order to
> > provide useful endpoint identifiers.  without a mechanism to map the
> > endpoint identifier to an IP address, such identifiers are useless
> > in referrals between application components.
> 
> Correct, if you assume that there will be situations in which you only
> have the endpoint identifier and you need the IP address.  That's not
> the only conceivable way of passing around a referal, it's just the
> one that's closest to being a drop-in replacement for a referal
> mechanism based on raw IP addresess.

well, we've had people saying that you shouldn't pass around the IP
address.  obviously the new identifier doesn't help you avoid passing
around the IP address if you can't get the IP address from the
identifier.