Although it is possible that I am not understanding your point, I believe your correction is incorrect.

127.1 is 127.0.0.1. There is no range. 127.1.1 is 127.1.0.1. Again, there is no range. (Well, to be exact, there is a range of 1) The spec allows zero's before the last to be left out as a convenient expression form, not as a method of defining subnet's or 'range'. IPv6 has a similar form that allows a single '::' to be specified within the address that indicates that all missing numbers at this location are 0. Again, it is a convenient expression form, and nothing more.

I suppose you probably are misunderstanding me.
By "range", I mean the range of possible numeric values in each part. For example, in the typical "dotted quad" notation, the range of legal values in each part is 0 to 255, the possible values of an unsigned 8-bit number.
When there are only three parts, the first two are 8 bits in size (thus have the usual range 0-255), but the last part represents a 16-bit number, and thus can legally have any value in the range 0 - 65535. 127.1.54321 is a legal, valid IP address.
If you disagree with that, then you are simply mistaken. Try it:  inet_aton("127.1.54321");

jdporter
The 6th Rule of Perl Club is -- There is no Rule #6.

I did misunderstand you, and also, I was not aware of the behaviour that you are referencing.

Do you have a solid reference (from an RFC, STD, FYI, ISO, or POSIX document?) that describes this addressing notation? I did quite a few searches myself, and other than a few manpages that describes 'this is how inet_aton works', and the source code for inet_aton in GLIBC describing the intended effect, I cannot find any reference on the Internet that describes this 'feature'. In fact, I find the opposite. RFC's regarding the use of addresses in an email address seem to require that each decimal integer be in the range 0-255 (although they also seem to require 4 integers).

Netscape on Linux supports addresses such as http://192.1204551/ (aka http://192.18.97.71/ aka http://java.sun.com/). Internet Explorer under Windows does not. Are you certain that this feature is portable? Or was it a convenient notation that was merely introduced in one of the earlier BSD tracks, and has continued to exist until today? Until I can verify that this feature is standard and portable, I cannot agree with your correction. I would appreciate it if you could prove to me that I am wrong. I hate not knowing.