Live data from Hacker News

How domains became backwards

david.newgas.net

1–10 of 39 posts

Re: How domains became backwards

#3
Funny to think that if Twitter handles were fragments of email addresses they would be backwards:

com.twitter@holysee

---

By the way, this must be a mistake:

This is a clearly a byproduct of the right-to-left language of the designers of these systems

Re: How domains became backwards

#4

Interesting. Now I wonder why Java decided to go the other way with a reversed domain name for packages. E.g., com.company-name.package-name

well, for the same reasons the urls _should_ be the other way around, plus avoiding inconsistencies with other languages I guess (don't know what languages supported dot-named packages at that time, but I don't think they were the first ones)

Re: How domains became backwards

#5
post #3

Funny to think that if Twitter handles were fragments of email addresses they would be backwards: com.twitter@holysee --- By the way, this must be a mistake: This is a clearly a byproduct of the right-to-left language of the designers of these systems

That language is math. Which, due to historical accident, was inspired by Arabic writing, rather than the Latin variety.

Re: How domains became backwards

#6
post #3

Funny to think that if Twitter handles were fragments of email addresses they would be backwards: com.twitter@holysee --- By the way, this must be a mistake: This is a clearly a byproduct of the right-to-left language of the designers of these systems

That language is math . Which, due to historical accident, was inspired by Arabic writing, rather than the Latin variety.

that sounds interesting, but i'm having a hard time getting my head round it. can you give an example where math is right to left?

[edit oh, numbers! thanks! i was thinking about algebra.]

Re: How domains became backwards

#7

Interesting. Now I wonder why Java decided to go the other way with a reversed domain name for packages. E.g., com.company-name.package-name

In the initial implementation package names were literally mapped to a path with the equivalent of subst(".", "/").

So in that sense the java package names are based on the hierarchy of a filesystem.

Re: How domains became backwards

#8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That language is math . Which, due to historical accident, was inspired by Arabic writing, rather than the Latin variety.

that sounds interesting, but i'm having a hard time getting my head round it. can you give an example where math is right to left? [edit oh, numbers! thanks! i was thinking about algebra.]

Think of the standard addition and multiplication algorithms. You start with the rightmost place, right?

Re: How domains became backwards

#9
The UK "Grey Book" email system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloured_Book_protocols) used email addresses the other way around (in the same timeframe that the UK was using a stack over X.25 as their internetworking protocol).

For example, a user at Imperial College (IC) would have been: user@uk.ac.ic, rather than user@ic.ac.uk as they might today.

Email gateways existed to convert between the different systems, but when all country codes were added to the internet, some addresses were simply ambiguous. (An address ending in .cs might be either czechoslavakia or a computer science department.)

The main email software responsible for this slicing and dicing was known as PP, which helps explain the excellent quote on ASR (alt.sysadmin.recovery) a few years later:

http://home.xnet.com/~raven/Sysadmin/ASR.Quotes.html [search page for "mail transfer agents"]

Re: How domains became backwards

#10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That language is math . Which, due to historical accident, was inspired by Arabic writing, rather than the Latin variety.

that sounds interesting, but i'm having a hard time getting my head round it. can you give an example where math is right to left? [edit oh, numbers! thanks! i was thinking about algebra.]

Think about basic math aka addition, subtraction, and multiplication work.

  1237 + 4567
  7+7 = 14 = 4
  3+6 + 1 = 10 = 0
  2+5+1 = 7
  1+4 = 5
  5704
That's right to left. If we wrote numbers left to right we the 1's place would be on the left.
Post reply on HN