In this All Things Linguistic post Gretchen and Lauren introduce a model dialogue:

G: “Would you like some coffee?”

L: “Coffee would keep me awake.”

This might mean Lauren wants coffee—or that she doesn’t want coffee! Her reply on its own is ambiguous. It must be interpreted in a wider context. The post digs into the dialogue more deeply.

In linguistics, the Cooperative Principle can be used to set up a frame within which utterances like these can be interpreted.

Network protocols are just the same. Utterances—packets sent along the wire—must be interpreted using a similar assumption of cooperation. And, just as in human conversation, an utterance can have a deeper, more ambiguous meaning than it seems on its face.

Acknowledgements in TCP

In TCP, the “ack” field contains a sequence number that is supposed to be used by a receiving peer to signal the sending peer that bytes up-to-but-not-including that sequence number have been safely received.

If it’s used that way, it makes TCP a reliable, in-order protocol.

Lying to the sending TCP

But imagine a receiver that didn’t very much care about reliability beyond that offered by the underlying transport. For example, a VOIP receiver, where delayed or lost voice packets are useless, and in fact harmful if carried over TCP because they delay packets travelling behind them, causing the whole conversation to get more and more delayed.

That receiver could lie. It could use the “ack” sequence number field to indicate which bytes it no longer cared about.

In effect, it would ignore lost packets, and use the “ack” field to tell the sender not to bother retransmitting them.

That decision would make TCP a best-effort, in-order protocol.

Is it really a lie?

Seen one way, this abuse of the “ack” field isn’t a lie. In both cases, the receiver doesn’t care about the bytes anymore: on the one hand, because they’ve been received successfully; on the other, because they’re irrelevant now.

It’s similar to the ambiguity about the coffee in the example above.

The surface meaning is clear. The deeper meaning depends on knowledge about the wider context that isn’t carried in the utterance itself.

We can assume cooperation without assuming motivation

The statement “Don’t send me bytes numbered lower than X” can be interpreted either as “I have received all bytes numbered lower than X” or “I no longer care about bytes numbered lower than X”. Only context can tell them apart.

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PS. My dissertation proposes Syndicate, a design for new programming language features for concurrency. Syndicate incorporates ideas about conversation and cooperativity like those discussed here. (See, in particular, chapter 2 of the dissertation.) It’s still early days, but I’ve put up a resource page at http://syndicate-lang.org/tonyg-dissertation/ that has the dissertation itself, a video of the defense talk I gave, and a few other resources.