I think it's more likely that numerous programs have worked around the issues of the built in type for a decade and/or changed scope/modified functionality to a

I think it's more likely that numerous programs have worked around the issues of the built in type for a decade and/or changed scope/modified functionality to avoid it. I had to work around one of the issues here in my first use of the built in ip type - I needed to parse ip addresses and pass them to a command that needed a tcp4 or tcp6 flag depending on the address type.