Software practice · 1980
RFC 761: The Robustness Principle
Request for Comments 761 · Excerpt · January 1980
The philosophy chapter of the 1980 TCP specification, which ends with the principle: be conservative in what you do.
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- A2
- License
- Free reproduction (RFC Editor)
- Source
- rfc-editor.org
- Retrieved
- 27 September 2026
- Language
- English
- Rights holder
- Jon Postel, Editor, Information Sciences Institute, 1980
Theme
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Print from A2: the smallest A size at which the body text is at least 8 pt.
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Edition
RFC Editor plain-text edition. Excerpt: chapter 2, Philosophy, in full, from section 2.1 to section 2.10, Robustness Principle, which ends the chapter; with the preface of the document under the header, and the two entries of its reference list that the chapter cites ([3] and [4]). Page headers and footers are left out, the lines of each paragraph are joined, and the one paragraph that a page break cuts (between pages 11 and 12) is joined again; the double spaces after full stops collapse. Figure 2 is reproduced unchanged. Straight quotes are set as typographic ones. The signature of the preface, “Jon Postel, Editor”, is the author line of the poster.
Rights
All RFCs may be freely reproduced and translated (unmodified).
RFC Editor, https://www.rfc-editor.org/faq/. RFC 761 itself carries no copyright notice.
