Rick,
Gee, I dunno... Adding the stamp is no worse than adding another
character and we haven't stopped adding characters. And I suspect
the readers would catch up quickly.
Usually when I buy Olives, I look for the age of the olives on the
jar, not a stamp on each olive...
Similarly, I would expect to see a stamp only in the first string,
assuming it would be remembered for the remainder of the connection.
Of course if these are short strings being used in a connectionless
environment (i.e. no remembered state), the overhead is a little more
significant. But hey, aren't we the group that says doubling or quadrupling
the character size is not significant cost... So what's a couple more
bytes. :-) More seriously, I would think if you were slinging strings in
a connectionless environment, either the character set and encoding
is fixed and well-understood by all players and the version ID is not
needed, or the character set and encoding varies among the players and
there is already some overhead in communicating this information and
another few bytes to indicate version is not a killer. But hey, its optional.
That being said, I don't want to engage in a lengthy
debate for this particular idea.
Having suggested that a self-identifying protocol is better than using
naming conventions for identification, I am satisfied to leave it at that.
Now do we have some real-time martini's to go with those olives?
:-)
--- Forwarded mail from Rick McGowan <titan!next.com!Rick_McGowan>
> perhaps the UTF8 protocol should define an optional version stamp
This would have been a more interesting idea at some point in the past, but...
at this point UTF8 data exists in vast mounds, so anything done would have to
still account for this compatibility... Old readers would wind up with some
incomprehensible blip in *ALL* newly encoded data from sources that stamp.
A version stamp in short strings is also a pretty burdensome thing, if people
are slinging them around. Imagine hand-stuffing olives for thousands of
cocktails in real time... The version tag becomes useful mainly in long
streams of data from static sources wending between non-cooperating processes.
Rick
---End of forwarded mail from Rick McGowan <titan!next.com!Rick_McGowan>
-------------------------------------------------------
Tex Texin
International Development Mgr. Fax: +1-617-280-4949
Progress Software Corp. Voice: +1-617-280-4271
14 Oak Park http://www.progress.com
Bedford, MA 01730 USA texin@bedford.progress.com
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