[Python-Dev] PEP 3144 review. (original) (raw)

Steven D'Aprano steve at pearwood.info
Sun Sep 27 03:08:32 CEST 2009

On Sun, 27 Sep 2009 03:44:45 am Martin v. Löwis wrote:

> - Masks are also 32- (128-) bit integers, which happen to have the > property that their leftmost N bits are all zero and the rest > are all one.

As a side note, I would be in favor of dropping the concept of a mask from the library, and only support a prefix length.

-1

IPv6 doesn't support masks at all, and even for IPv4, I think there are conventions (if not RFCs) against using them in a way that does not correspond to a prefix length.

Then the module should only support netmasks of the form (say) '255.255.255.224' (equivalent to "/27"), and reject those like "255.3.255.255". It currently accepts them.

Many applications still display netmasks in dot-quad form, and I would be terribly annoyed if I had to count the bits myself before passing it to IPv4Address.

-- Steven D'Aprano

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