Message for Bind-users

[Eric A. Hall]

> There is no "practical" reason other than "this is the standard we
> agreed to way back when and we're afraid to change it because then
> we might break some lazy programmers' code (possibly causing security
> holes, cancer, famine, or maybe even global thermonuclear
> devastation)".

You are certainly free to use whatever characters you want to. Just
don't post here complaining that your applications are no longer
working. I have seen many brave fools try to use underscores, and then
things like DHCP, SMTP and the other services that enforce the naming
rules just stop working.

Pretty soon, either the underscores or the fool are gone.

> As for the historical reason, I've heard second- or third-hand that
> some old teletypes used underscores instead of backspaces, or
> something primitive like that.

When ARPAnet was first put together, there wasn't an ASCII standard.
Every host used different character sets. Using an underscore in a name
has always been a good way to keep people from connecting to you. It
still is.

> This restriction kinda reminds me of how the dimensions of some of
> the space shuttle parts are supposedly influenced by the width of a
> Roman warhorse's rear end (war horses -> roads -> wagons -> railroad
> tracks, you get the idea). Everyone is always too cowardly to risk
> breaking compatibility with the old junk, so we have to live with
> these arbitrary restrictions forever...

If you read the rest of that, you'd have seen that the rockets are that
size because the tunnels are that size. So breaking tradition in that
case would mean that the rockets wouldn't get to the pad. The analogy is
pretty much the same here. You can certainly say and do whatever you
want, but you will most likely regret having done it.

-- 
Eric A. Hall                                      http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols        http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/