On Sun, Oct 9, 2011 at 4:44 PM, Paul Bennett <paul.w.benn...@gmail.com> wrote: > Ah, but an IP address *is* really a number. An unsigned 128-bit integer, in > fact, with some additional properties that are specific to the semantics of > IP addresses themselves.
Do you really want your end users to think of IP addresses as numbers? > True, certain operations (multiplication and division spring to mind) are -- > probably -- bad ideas, but addition, subtraction, bitwise operations, > bitshifting, comparison (including range comparison and sorting), and many > other good numbery things definitely apply. You're confusing implementation and interface. I'm not saying bigints are a wrong implementation for this, I'm saying you shouldn't expose that to your end users. Precisely because almost all numeric operations do not make sense on an IP address. Leon
