scw%ucla-locus@cepu.UUCP (01/30/84)
From: Steve Woods <cepu!scw@ucla-locus> Also posted to: net.mail Article-I.D.: dciem.653 >Good idea. But area codes tend to be unique only within countries >(North America counts as one country here). So there has to be >another convention for the overseas sites. A logical one would be >the country name, truncated or abbreviated to 2-6 characters. >For instance, uk, france, nether. It seems to me that a solution to this already exsists. The International Motorting Community has a set of unique letters that define countries, (EU<USA>,GB,FR,AL<D>,DK etc.) I believe that they are the first letters in the countries name (or initals) in French/English. >But then if we're using geographic names in Europe, why not use them >in North America? I refer to STATES and PROVINCES. They are better >known than area codes and they have unique abbreviations of 2 letters. >(How legitimate the 2-letter abbreviations are in the case of Canadian >provinces is questionable, but there is an established set which does >not conflict with the state abbreviations.) See above, by combining the two systems you end up with a (4 or 5 letter) combination that is both unique and easy to remember. >Mark Brader >Shall we say... {IL/ihnp4, NH/decvax, MA/linus, ...} !ON/utzoo!ON/dciem!ntt >Hmph, maybe a default is needed so that the null domain means a >backbone site. I Would think that the default should be: no domain is the current domain. It then is the responsabity of each site within a domain to maintain uniqueness. There is hownever a very *LARGE* problem with this: Some sites in a given domain may comunicate *only* with sites outside of their nominal domain. (This problem is true of almost any domain scheme that you can come up with that is based on geographic mappings). -- I am, y'r obd't s'vt Stephen C. Woods (VA Wadsworth Med Ctr./UCLA Dept. of Neurology) uucp: ...{ EU-CO.hao!EU-CA., EU-CA.trw-unix!, EU-CA.sdcsvax!bmcg!}cepu!scw ARPA: cepu!scw@ucla-locus location: N 34 06'37" W 118 25'43"