Wouldn't it have been nice if the de facto APIs in use today were more along the lines of ConnectTo(DNS name, service/port).
This certainly seems to be the way that "modern" APIs are heading. If I'm not mistaken, Java, PHP, Perl, Tcl, Python and most other scripting languages have a socket-like API that does not expose IP addresses, but rather connects directly to DNS names. (In many cases, they unify file and socket opening and specify the application protocol, to, so that one can do fopen("http://www.ietf.org";), for example.) Thus, we're well on our way towards the goal of making (some) application oblivious to addresses. I suspect that one reason for the popularity of these languages is exactly that programmers don't want to bother remembering when to use ntohs().
Henning _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf