[twic]

The dot doesn't make that a decimal, any more than it makes IP addresses or version numbers decimals.

As for treating them as decimals inadvertently, well, hopefully client libraries will expose IDs as pairs of integers, not as strings. If users convert them into strings and then back into meaningless pseudo-decimals, well, great, we'll have an entertaining post about someone's outage to read.

[hueving]

This is a terrible attitude to have when responding to an obvious potential UX confusion, particularly when it will only come up in edge cases (>10 per millisecond).

[maerF0x0]

10 per milli as an edge case is domain specific.

[rjeli]

But, it has milliseconds on the left. Before I read the explanation, I immediately thought it was a floating point timestamp. IP addresses have no reasonable decimal interpretation.

[anyfoo]

It's not much of a problem for (v4) IPs, because they almost always consist of 4 numbers separated by a dot, making them immediately distinguishable from decimal numbers. If two-component IPs were common (they are sometimes seen in CIDR notation, but not often), the dot would have been an unfortunate separator choice as well.

For versions with only two components, I would argue that the dot can be confusing already.

Why use a separator that has the potential of confusion when there are several other choices with less potential?

[nurettin]

I had the same thoughts until the haha-outage hyperbole. Perhaps this little feature spurring so much discussion about delimiters is caused by a lack of thought by the developer, releasing an idea before it fully matured. A sort of race towards innovation mixed with a hint of it-works-ship-it.

[xapata]

Ah yes, like trap answers on a multiple choice exam. I suppose the Zen of that design would be: "There should be more than one obvious way to do it, but only one correct way."