> From: Christopher Morrow <morrowc.lists at gmail.com>
> context isnt 'mail.lcs.mit.edu' but rather: "192.168.2.2" in today'sn
> noel can explain a bunch more of this, but.. I think 'name' in his
> parlance
Yes, I was using 'name' in the very generic sense of 'an identifying label
for an object, of no particular syntax or semantics'. As I wrote in
http://www.chiappa.net/~jnc/tech/endpoints.txt (Section 2 'Terminology of
Naming and Binding'):
The terms "object" and "name" are hopefully self-explanatory: it is crucial
to differentiate between the thing itself, and any identifier (in the
generic sense) by which we refer to it. In this paper, whenever the term
"name" is used, unless otherwise explicitly indicated, the meaning given to
it is the generic one of "an identifier (of no specific syntax or
properties) for an object".
Thus, the phrase "name of a host" does *not* refer to an existing system of
printable strings (e.g "lcs.mit.edu"), or somesuch; it refers, instead, to
the abstract concept of an identifier for a host. (The term "host-name" is
used to refer to such printable strings, at the possible risk of some
confusion, because it is of long-standing use in the networking community.)
This may seem confusing (and some might suggest use of a different term for
"name"), but the use of the term "name" in this manner is established in
the literature (along with subsidiary terminology such as "namespace"), and
while use of the term "name" has perhaps been confused in the networking
community, it seems a major distraction to try and tackle that issue now.
Noel
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