[ppml] Policy Proposal 2005-9: 4-Byte AS Number

[Michael.Dillon at btradianz.com]

>To reiterate for the record now that this is a formal policy proposal, I
> would agree with the apparent ppml consensus 

Consensus?

>that the colon separator
> should be changed to a period to avoid confusion with the nomenclature
> used by BGP communities. 

Several people pointed out that there is no need
for any special separator since the decimal number system
in common use already allows for representing numbers 
greater than 65535. In other words, there was not any
CONSENSUS about sticking spurious punctuation marks
into AS numbers.

Is the number 0.63535 a valid AS number?
What about 0.65553?

When the dot notation was introduced for IP addresses,
they marked an important bit boundary that was a fundamental
part of the IP address. The 32 bit identifier was divided
into a NETWORK portion and a HOST portion. This division
was done on one of three 8-bit boundaries depending on
address class and therefore there are 3 dots in an IP 
address marking the boundaries.

AS numbers are simple integers with no such internal
structure.

--Michael Dillon