Yeah it's annoying, I've come across numerous address parsing bugs because of this. I think the reason they needed to use a different delimiter is because IPv6

Yeah it's annoying, I've come across numerous address parsing bugs because of this. I think the reason they needed to use a different delimiter is because IPv6 addresses can also omit entire portions of zeros as a convenience feature to shorten addresses, which means there are a subset of shortened addresses that look exactly like IPv4 if not for the delimiter.