On Thu, Jan 07, 2010 at 03:18:43AM +0100, Brian E Carpenter wrote: > Surely we can never hope to eliminate the need for converting to a > a canonical form before comparing. The canonical form for machine > comparisons is fairly obvious - a 128 bit binary number. The question > seems to be whether we can define a canonical form for eyeball comparisons.
> I thought the idea of this work was to help humans by minimising the > variability in the "printed" version of an address. The motivation is not just eyeball comparison by humans as explained in section 3 of the ID. IP addresses are stored in many places in a textual form where the options of automated search and comparison are textual and conversion to a 128-bit binary number for comparison is often not a realistic option. Section 3 of the ID discusses some examples. /js -- Juergen Schoenwaelder Jacobs University Bremen gGmbH Phone: +49 421 200 3587 Campus Ring 1, 28759 Bremen, Germany Fax: +49 421 200 3103 <http://www.jacobs-university.de/> -------------------------------------------------------------------- IETF IPv6 working group mailing list ipv6@ietf.org Administrative Requests: https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ipv6 --------------------------------------------------------------------
