It’s really not that magical. If you consider that an IP address is 4 separate octets, that’s 32 bits of memory. These 32 bits of memory can be expressed in 4 variables in 8 bits (that you’re used to), or can be expressed in 1 variable of 32 bits. So basically, you normally have an IP address of 216.239.39.104. If you convert each number into binary, you get 11011000.11101111.00100111.01101000. Remove the decimals and you get 11011000111011110010011101101000. Convert this back to decimal and you get 3639551848.
Why exactly programs like firefox and IE allow this as a valid URL, I’m not sure. I think it has to do with the fact that IP addresses are typically stored as 4 adjacent bytes in memory, so no one cares if you overwrite those bytes 4 times with 4 numbers or once with one bigass number. That’s just pure speculation.
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It’s really not that magical. If you consider that an IP address is 4 separate octets, that’s 32 bits of memory. These 32 bits of memory can be expressed in 4 variables in 8 bits (that you’re used to), or can be expressed in 1 variable of 32 bits. So basically, you normally have an IP address of 216.239.39.104. If you convert each number into binary, you get 11011000.11101111.00100111.01101000. Remove the decimals and you get 11011000111011110010011101101000. Convert this back to decimal and you get 3639551848.
Why exactly programs like firefox and IE allow this as a valid URL, I’m not sure. I think it has to do with the fact that IP addresses are typically stored as 4 adjacent bytes in memory, so no one cares if you overwrite those bytes 4 times with 4 numbers or once with one bigass number. That’s just pure speculation.
Thanks for writing it all down what I was just too lazy to spell out. Is Arthur C. Clark dead ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke