On 17 October 2004 10:38, Graham Klyne wrote:

At 11:09 16/10/04 +0200, Tomasz Zielonka wrote:

...

On Sat, Oct 16, 2004 at 09:37:02AM +0100, Graham Klyne wrote:

...

It seems to me that using a single integer/bitstring value for internal representation of IP addresses is rather missing a trick.

But that's just what IP4 address is: 32 bits

Well, on the wire it's 32 bits, but from an application's viewpoint, IMO, it's an abstract value that is used to address an endpoint. From the user's PoV, it's (usually) four decimal numbers separated by '.'.

Absolutely. Network.Socket exports HostAddress as a Word32 in network byte order because it is a low-level library - a higher-level abstraction layer should definitely provide an abstract version of this. We don't have a good higher-level network library, though (Network is a bit feeble). Cheers, Simon