I work in networking, not particularly close to the hardware. I have colleagues who manipulate IP addresses by looking at the string representation of the addre

I work in networking, not particularly close to the hardware. I have colleagues who manipulate IP addresses by looking at the string representation of the address, splitting on the `.`, casting each part back to an integer, etc. Their code breaks as soon as we use a netmask other that /24 or (shock, horror!) we run in an IPv6 environments.