Marcus Mendenhall wrote:
The getsockaddr call uses them (actually the correct name for one of the flags is AI_NUMERICHOST, not AI_NUMERIC as I originally stated), and its part of the BSD sockets library, which is basically what the python socketmodule wraps.
More importantly, it is part of RFC 2553, which Python uses; it is also part of Winsock2.
I guess intercepting all numeric is OK, it is just less efficient (since it requires a trial parsing of an address, which is wasted if it is not all numeric), and because it is so easy to implement <numeric>.
But isn't the same trial parsing needed to determine presence of the "<numeric>" flag? The trial parsing Guido proposes usually stops with the first letter in a non-numeric address, and accesses up to 16 letters for a numeric address. Regards, Martin