R. David Murray <rdmur...@bitdance.com> added the comment: In pre-CIDR days, assuming a prefixlen of 24 for a 192.168.x.x address made sense. Nowadays it is better not to make that assumption. So I find ipaddr's default of 32 to be "safer" than using a class based default.
The larger point, however, is that there _is_ a mask associated with the address in ifconfig. There _must_ be one. So that is not an example that shows that a separate address class is useful. As for the == thing, I agreed with you that address compared to network, if you had an address class, would yield false. My point was that HypotheticalNetworkClass('192.168.1.1') == HypotheticalNetworkClass('192.168.1.1/32') should yield True, because, as I said above, in a CIDR world using a default of a hostmask for an otherwise unadorned address makes the most sense. As for an example of when the equivalence is useful, it is useful every time I set up an access rule or route that applies to a single host. Otherwise, I _must_ give a specific netmask, because in real life the classfull default is often not the correct netmask. Most networking software that I've dealt with requires explicit netmasks (often with a shorthand to specify an ip/hostmask pair). It is true that when a netmask isn't required it generally defaults to the classful netmask, but having such a default is becoming more rare with time, in my experience (because of CIDR). ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue3959> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com