Subject: Re: [lisp] LISP: update to charter in external review

From: Michael Menth <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Mar 2009 22:44:48 +0200

Sam Hartman schrieb:
>>>>>> "Michael" == Michael Menth <[email-masked]> writes:
>>>>>>             
>
>     Michael> The sentence "who you are" is rather confusing to me
>     Michael> although its intention is certainly to be a simple and
>     Michael> catchy explanation. However, "you" - the user (?) is
>     Michael> probably not an edge interface designator. "who you are"
>     Michael> suggests that the identifier has something to do with the
>     Michael> identity of some device or its owner (whoever "you" is)
>     Michael> that would stay the same when moving around which is
>     Michael> clearly not the case in this context.
>
>     Michael> Wouldn't it be clearer to say: core Routing Locators
>     Michael> (which describe "where" an edge network is attached to
>     Michael> the Internet core) and edge interface designators (which
>     Michael> describe to "which" interface a device is attached within
>     Michael> an edge network)? I find this easier to understand and
>     Michael> according to my understanding this is 100% in line with
>     Michael> the third paragraph of the charter.
>
>
> the second paragraph is intended to be far more general than LISP and
> carefully avoids using any LISP terms.  

Indeed, the second paragraph does not yet contain the word LISP, that's 
true, but somehow my expectation was that the second paragraph of the 
charter must be about LISP.  And my expectation was confirmed by the 
word "Routing Locator" (uppercase) instead of simply "locator" 
(lowercase) and Identifier (uppercase) instead of "identifier" 
(lowercase). I read both uppercase words as proper names of a specific 
architecture which was LISP for me in this context. So, the removal of 
LISP-specific or LISP-like nomenclature was not yet fully successful. 
But I don't think that this was the major problem.

> I think it is accurate,
> although the pronoun "you" is unbound.  For LISP, it's an edge network
> (in your vocabulary),a site in others' vocabulary, etc.  For HIPP, you
> is bound to a something.  Some people would probably say stack,
> although that's misleading as HIP explicitly supports stacks with
> multiple HITs.  For shim6, you is bound to something close to stack,
> although it's a bit more complicated than that.
>
> The second paragraph has not undergone a lot of editing other than to
> remove LISP-specific terms from the general description.  However, it
> also has not drawn a lot of fire.  

The unbound pronoun "you" really puzzled me. Your interpretation of the 
"you" with the examples of the other architectures makes sense to me, 
but the text says nothing about them. I rather read the text "Identifier 
(who you are)" as an implicit definition of what an identifier is, 
namely a name that has something to do with my identity or that of my 
devices. I found this implicit definition a contradition to how an 
identifier is used in the third paragraph.

I did not carefully follow all the discussions on this list, but I was 
curious about how the charter looks in the end. And when I saw the new 
charter I was just puzzled about the implicit definition of an 
identifier and its subsequent clarification of the opposite in LISP.

I certainly do not want to propose a specific changes to the charter, I 
was just wondering and wanted to give you feedback. You can apply 
changes if you think that my misunderstanding has something to do with 
the text.

Michael

-- 
Dr. Michael Menth, Assistant Professor
University of Wuerzburg, Institute of Computer Science
Am Hubland, D-97074 Wuerzburg, Germany, room B206
phone: (+49)-931/888-6644, fax: (+49)-931/888-6632
mailto:[email-masked]
http://www3.informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de/research/ngn