Postel's law

English

Alternative forms

  • Postel's Law

Etymology

Named after Internet pioneer Jon Postel (1943–1998).

Proper noun

Postel's law

  1. (software engineering) The design principle that software should be conservative as to its own behaviour (i.e. strictly compliant with specifications) but liberal in the behaviour it tolerates from other systems.
    • 2005, Jesse Liberty, Visual C# 2005: A Developer's Notebook, O'Reilly Media, →ISBN, page 47:
      Contravariance is consistent with Postel's Law: “Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.”

Further reading

This article is issued from Wiktionary. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.