[Python-Dev] PEP 3144 review.

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Andrew McNamara writes:

 > Conceptually, you sometimes need a bare address, and other times,
 > you need an address with an associated network (host interface
 > configs, router configs, etc). By AddressWithMask, I really mean
 > AddressWithEnoughInformationToDeriveNetworkWhenNeeded. Conveniently,
 > IPv4 and IPv6 addressing allows us to derive the network from the
 > host

That's precisely the claim I deny.  Yes, you can derive the network
*address* from a generic address and a mask.  You cannot derive the
*network* that way!  Eg, suppose in a routing application you have

class IPv4NetworkWithGateway(IPv4Network):

... oops.  You want *the* IPv4Network instance that has all the
gateway info, not just *any* IPv4Network instance that happens to have
the same network address and mask.  Address + mask is *not* sufficient
to derive the desired IPv4Network instance.

I grant that sometimes all you really care about is that the network
address and the mask match; constructing on the fly would be
sufficient.  However, many of the applications I can think of attach
additional attributes to IPv4Networks, and really do want "the real
thing" vs. a constructed imitation.