> Many current processors do not find 128 bit integer arithmetic, as required for this technique, a trivial operation. This is not considered a serious drawback in the representation, but a flaw of the processor designs.
Oh, IETF, please never change.
[1]: http://lifehacker.com/162484/save-time-with-text-substitutio...
Base 32 seems like a good half-way solution of length reduction vs glyph complexity, as Base 64 or Base 89 (or whichever the RFC suggest) include too many distracting characters (IMHO).
Of course, Chinese/Japanese speakers have a natural advantage here (Katana and Hirigana both fall short of a contiguous 64 character mapping):
ip6emoji("fe8000000000000003ceecdfffe30c27",Char(0x3300),stride=8) => "㏰㌀㌏㏷"
( though hopefully that's not some form of insult in Chinese! ;) )
::6ULMVEU0000000000000000001
::160VPFH8R80000000000000002
::7UG000000000007JNCRVVU6317
::7UG00000000000000000000001
::160VSB0G07G28000000000080E
Without using the shift key it's easy to type base 32 numbers. That comes out to an average of 26 characters per IPV6 address.
So Hex
Becomes base 32: If we are willing to use the shift key we could move up to Base 64 and get it down to an average of 21 characters. (Anyone know why the standard base 64 alphabet starts at A instead of 0?): Now if we are willing to use unicode characters, why stop at base 256? Unicode has 95,000 characters so we could use a base 65,536 number and cut it down to 8 characters, now we're talking! Unfortunately to get it down to 4 characters would require 4,294,967,296 different characters. Even the extended unicode set won't get us there.But maybe an alphabet with emoji could be practical. You could have smiley or sad faces in your IP address. All kinds of possibilities with that. Though software such as this HN website would have to be fixed to be able to display it. But you know, a long term project.