Alex Balashov wrote:
It's certainly shorter. The issue is that it takes more effort and time mentally to compute contiguity, subnet boundaries, etc. because the numbers involved are not base 10.
As you suggest, it's something one can probably get used to. But it sure is ugly in the interim.
Being a systems programmer by trade, I have little difficulty counting in hex. It's just harder than counting in base 10, especially for people who aren't similarly disposed. And contractions do make it difficult to read.
I do think that's one of the major barriers to the adoption of IPv6 in a commonsensical, pedestrian way. Nobody is against bigger address space, increased security, more interface autoconfiguration, etc. I think they just look at the addresses and go, "Uh, I don't want to read THAT..."
2607:f4b8:2:1:222:19ff:fe06:3f1/64 9735.62648.2.1.546.6655.65030.1009/64 50551973403764158466205629362970428401/64 The choice is theirs, I suppose. I mean, we don't really have a choice on the expanded address space, might as well go big and never worry about it until after we retire :)