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jasomilltoday at 4:29 AM0 repliesview on HN

At best future-resistant.

True future-proofing would require representing address length as an arbitrary-precision nonzero unsigned integer.

Since allowing a zero-length network address format would serve no purpose other than to pointlessly complicate standards definitions, you could trivially and without loss of generality interpret zero to denote some extended-length address length representation to be defined in a future version of the standard.