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Re:The world in which IPv6 was a good design by bombcar on Sunday April 19, 2026 @04:17PM (#47827313)
Flexible! The first byte tells you how many bytes of addressing you have. Perfect and future proof!
Re:The world in which IPv6 was a good design by jasomill on Monday April 20, 2026 @12:29AM (#47830411)
At best future-resistant.

True future-proofing would require representing address length as an arbitrary-precision nonzero unsigned integer.

Since allowing a zero-length network address format would serve no purpose other than to pointlessly complicate standards definitions, you could trivially and without loss of generality interpret zero to denote some extended-length address length representation to be defined in a future version of the standard.

Re:The world in which IPv6 was a good design by tremon on Monday April 20, 2026 @07:33AM (#47832827)
Hardware implementations typically do not like variable-size fields. Not just because the total header size becomes unpredictable, but because it means any following fields no longer have a fixed offset, and that complicates parsing.