Two stupid ip questions;

[Eugene Leitl]

bob.cat@juno.com writes:

 > There IS no *natural* way to express a number.
 
There is: use the smallest possible base. Binary is thus
special. Unfortunately, it's very unwieldy for humans, so 
one has to use something with a more useful widely used 
base and the least amount of cyphers: hex.
 
 > That notation doesn't work everywhere: WIN98 IE5.0 needs:
 > 
 > http://0xd8211404/    or
 > 
 > http://0xd8.0x21.0x14.0x04/
 > 
 > And it does like octal (leading 0 indicating octal):
 > 
 > http://033010212004   etc., etc...
 
Octal is nice. I don't like the noise characters to denote the used
base, though. http://d8211404/ is way shorter than http://0xd8.0x21.0x14.0x04/
 
 > There are many ways to express an IP address, and this is not OS
 > dependent. 
 
OS doesn't know anything about syntax: applications do. There ought to 
be a RFC for that.

 > Simply convert the address to base(2^128) and you'll just have one number
 > to remember!

Unfortunately, the amount of neural tissue devoted to 2^128 
representational systems required would undergo instant 
gravitational collapse, and create one hell of a singularity.