Re: Best way to index IP data?

On Jan 11, 2008, at 2:24 PM, Andrew Sullivan wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 11, 2008 at 05:02:36PM -0500, Michael Stone wrote:
>
>> networks), but there's a conspicuous lack of a type for (hosts). I
>> suppose if you really are sure that you want to store hosts and not
>> networks
>
> Well, part of the trouble is that in the CIDR world, an IP without a
> netmask
> can be dangerously ambiguous.  I can see why the design is as it is
> for that
> reason.  (But I understand the problem.)

I don't think there's ambiguity about what an dotted-quad without a
netmask
means, and hasn't been for a long time. Am I missing something?

There is ambiguity when you feed non dotted-quads into the
existing cidr I/O functions[1], but that's both a dead horse,
and not something likely to actually affect users negatively.

Cheers,
   Steve

[1] Because postgresql copied obsolete pre-CIDR code from libbind.