Another way to approach this would be for the Address object to potentially have a 'network' attribute referencing a Network object.
Yes - that's reasonable.
Then there are only two classes, but three use cases are covered:
1) a Network
2) a plain, network-agnostic Address with network == None
3) an Address with an attached Network
An Address could be constructed in three ways:
Address(ip_number)
Address(ip_number, network = <Network instance>)
Address(ip_number, mask = <mask>) # constructs and attaches a suitably-masked Network instance
I think you still need to support the common notations: Address('10.0.0.1') # .network == None Address('10.0.0.1/255.255.255.0') Address('10.0.0.1/24')
We could also have some_network[n] return an Address referring back to the network object it was obtained from.
Yes. (Of course, we're simplifying - there would really be classes for each protocol). -- Andrew McNamara, Senior Developer, Object Craft http://www.object-craft.com.au/