Re: iSCSI: Decimal encoding - why 64 bits ?

[Martins Krikis <mkrikis@yahoo.com>]

--- "Julian Satran (Actcom)"
<Julian_Satran@actcom.net.il> wrote:
> Martins - you have a very good point - and we
> considered briefly to forbid
> decimal from the outset but many of the team felt
> that this  would be a bad
> idea as values get copied from a context to another.
> And the we looked at
> coding for other RFCs and we found decimal
> everywhere - addresses,
> identifiers, ports etc., and thought it would be a
> bad idea to forbid them
> in iSCSI

Julian,

I cannot find a single post on this mailing list
saying that forbidding decimal encoding for binary
items would be a bad idea. I did find several (and
quoted 4) that actually recommended dropping decimal
encoding for binary items. Lately there have been
many more such posts. All those other RFCs, I
suspect, are actually dealing with numbers. I have
no objections to using decimal encoding for numbers
(that is things, that normally fit in your
machine's registers and are treated as numerical,
not as bit-strings). You have yet to provide an
example of something that is clearly a binary
string (and not used as a number) and is being
commonly encoded in decimal. If you find such a
thing, can you tell us what's the scheme for telling
how many null-bytes this binary string starts with?

Martins Krikis, Intel Corp.

Disclaimer: these opinions are mine and may not
             be those of my employer.


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