On May 20, 2005, at 16:43, Thomas Narten wrote:

How about if it just says:

The high-order flag is reserved and must be zero.

Actually, the issue that I'm trying to get around is to avoid having the spec say the flag "must be xxx" where xxx is any value. It should just (mostly) be ignored. If you say it must be zero, than some implementation might think if it is non-zero it should be changed to zero, or something equally silly.

Thus, I think:

      The high-order flag is reserved.

might be better than saying the full sentence.

I.e., a future spec will set it to 1 and presumably all the existing
implementations should continue doing what they did before hand --
i.e., just ignore the bit, not treating it having any special meaning
one way or the other.

With reserved fields in protocol headers, we typically say "ignored on
receipt". But that is not true for an address, because the value isn't
completely ignored, as its considered part of the address when doing
lookups or when comparing against other addresses.

But this is all a pretty minor point overall.


I emphatically agree that it is a minor point. The current text has been
in the spec from day 1 and has not caused problems. Given that,
I would prefer to leave the text as is.

Regards,
Brian


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