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Comment by georgyo | Hacker News Reader

This is all the bad parts of ipv6 with none of the good parts...

You still need to have routers, clients, and absolutely everything to understand the new scheme to use those new addresses.

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Not using hex is a plus I guess?

You're welcome to not use hex. For either addressing scheme.

And vice-versa for decimal on ipv6 if desired, I guess?

> And vice-versa for decimal on ipv6 if desired, I guess?

Or octal:

* https://networkingtoolbox.net/ip-address-convertor/represent...

IPv6 is 16 bytes, the person I replied to gives a 8 bytes scheme

However many bytes are used in the scheme, you could in theory use decimal or hexadecimal to represent an address in string form for either scheme. Once the string is unpacked and interpreted, the address is just a number.

Though I've never seen a v6 address represented that way, it would make then noticeably longer, so I don't know if anything will accept such a string as a valid address. Though IPv4-mapped addresses are sometimes show as a mix (::ffff:10.5.2.1 for 10.5.2.1) so maybe I'm wrong there.

Likewise I've never seen IPv4 addresses written in hex in the wild, but the relevant specs say it is valid. `ping 0xc0a82bc2` works just as well as `ping 192.168.43.194` but I doubt many forms accepting IPv4 addresses will validate that and allow it.

I have a script that does takes an IPv6 address and displays it as dotted decimal that I like to bring out any time this discussion pops up. As an example, Facebook's IP address:

  $ ./ipv6todecimal.py 2a03:2880:f366:1:face:b00c:0:25de
  Your IPv6 Address is: 42.3.40.128.243.102.0.1.250.206.176.12.0.0.37.222

Or good old 2600::

  $ ./ipv6todecimal.py 2600::
  Your IPv6 Address is: 38.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0

Computers use binary. Hex is a human convenience. For anyone in computers hex is much better than decimal for obvious reasons. For anybody not in computers hex makes no sense and I'd need weeks of math lectures (which they wouldn't do the homework for and thus fail) to explain it.

Honestly IPv4 addresses should always have been formatted in hex, like FF 00 00 69, with whatever delimiter. Would make it trivial to write directly as a 32-bit int, and parsing and formatting a string would also be cheaper. And you could have funny blocks like CAFE.0.0.

You can indeed make good use of those funny names in IPv6. If your /64 or /56 prefix is $prefix you can assign your coffee pot to $prefix::cafe or maybe keep it just fe80::cafe if you only want link local access to your coffee pot.

much easier than `cafe.local` with mDNS :)

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