It is a matter of machine readability vs human readability. Remember the IP was around when routers did not have a lot of horsepower. The dotted decimal notation was a compromise between pure binary (which the equipment used) and human readability. VLSM seems obvious now but in the beginning organizing various length routes into very expensive memory and low horsepower processors meant that it was much easier to break routes down along byte boundaries. This meant you only had four different lengths of route to deal with. It was intended to eliminate multiple passes sorting the tables. I am not quite sure what you mean about interspersing zeros, that would be meaningless. Remember that it is a mask. The address bits which are masked as 1s are significant to routing. The bits that are masked with 0s are the host portion and don't matter to the network routing table.
Steven Naslund Chicago IL >/24 is certainly cleaner than 255.255.255.0. > >I seem to remember it was Phil Karn who in the early 80's suggested that >expressing subnet masks as the number of bits from the top end of the address >word was efficient, since subnet masks were always a series of ones followd >>by zeros with no interspersing, which was incorporated (or independently >invented) about a decade later as CIDR a.b.c.d/n notation in RFC1519. > - Brian
