Message for Bind-users

[Alan J Rosenthal]

Kevin Darcy <kcd at daimlerchrysler.com> writes:
>McNair, Dan wrote:
>> Correct me if I am wrong, but the underscore is not a legal character
>> in any domain name.  This is not a limitation of BIND, it is a restriction
>> imposed by the domain name standard.  My guess is that there are both
>> practical and historical reasons for the restriction.
>
>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)".

Is there some particular reason you think underscores *should* be permitted
in hostnames?

The standard way to produce something looking like a space in a hostname
is to use a hyphen.  Is there some particular problem with this?

A working system doesn't need multiple ways to do the same thing.
Hyphens suffice.  More ways to signal a word separation will result in more
transcription errors.