Confused about TLAs, and what they mean? Concerned about the lack of TLA space, and it current rapid depletion? Don’t worry, there’s an RFC for that.
A Three-Letter Acronym (TLA) is a popular form of abbreviation usually based on the initial letters of a three-word term…
TLAs are particularly popular within the Internet community where they serve as abbreviations in the spoken and written word. As their popularity has grown, the measure of the value of an RFC (q.v.) is not only its successful implementation, interoperability, and deployment, but also the number of TLAs included in the text…
A common concern amongst diligent protocol implementers is that one acronym may have multiple expansions…Not only does this result in contention for acronyms, and confusion in interpretation of specification, it also leads to many wasted hours trying to select appropriate and suitably-unique names for variables within source code implementations…
Such confusion has the potential to degrade the performance of the Internet as misunderstandings lead to coding errors, compilation failures, misconfiguration, and other operating errors…
Furthermore, it should be noted that we are rapidly approaching World Acronym Depletion (WAD). It has been estimated that, at the current rate of TLA allocation, we will run out by the end of September this year…
According to the definition provided in Section 2, there are 36**3 – 10**3 = 45656 TLAs in total. This number will so easily be depleted that we must institute some policy for conservation. – RFC5513 Introduction (abbr.)