Network Routing, 2nd Edition

Appendix A

Notations, Conventions, and Symbols

In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.

Steve Jobs

A.1 On Notations and Conventions

In networking, we sometimes say that there are not enough bits or digits in a particular address space or a protocol field. We faced a somewhat similar situation with notations; we found that Roman and Greek scripts do not have enough alphabets to avoid repeats. Certainly, we were tempted to use Assamese and Tamil scripts ...