Namespace Design Choices

One of the design choices when identifying things is whether to make this name space flat or hierarchical. A flat name space would simply assign a unique, unstructured identifier (e.g., an integer) to each procedure, and this number would be carried in a single field in an RPC request message. This would require some kind of central coordination to avoid assigning the same procedure number to two different procedures. Alternatively, the protocol could implement a hierarchical name space, analogous to that used for file pathnames, which requires only that a file’s “basename” be unique within its directory. This approach potentially simplifies the job of ensuring uniqueness of procedure names. A hierarchical name space for RPC could be implemented by defining a set of fields in the request message format, one for each level of naming in, say, a two- or three-level hierarchical name space.