Statements against new.net?
Geoff Huston
gih at telstra.net
Wed Mar 14 03:59:39 UTC 2001
At 3/14/01 07:56 AM, Vadim Antonov wrote:
>That is based on the assumption that consistency is necessary
>or desireable :) Of course, it is dear to an engineer's mind,
>but the case from the sociological point of view is far from
>clear-cut. In fact, way too many woes of human societies can
>be (at least indirectly) attributed to the misguided attempts
>to enforce consistency.
This assumption is explicitly addressed in the RFC - I quote:
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1.1. Maintenance of a Common Symbol Set
Effective communications between two parties requires two essential
preconditions:
- The existence of a common symbol set, and
- The existence of a common semantic interpretation of these symbols.
Failure to meet the first condition implies a failure to communicate at
all, while failure to meet the second implies that the meaning of the
communication is lost.
In the case of a public communications system this condition of a common
symbol set with a common semantic interpretation must be further
strengthened to that of a unique symbol set with a unique semantic
interpretation. This condition of uniqueness allows any party to initiate a
communication that can be received and understood by any other party. Such
a condition rules out the ability to define a symbol within some bounded
context. In such a case, once the communication moves out of the context of
interpretation in which it was defined, the meaning of the symbol becomes
lost.
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