I've been tinkering with the ipaddress module as I review Eli's documentation and have uncovered a *very* nasty interaction between ipaddress objects and the bytes constructor.

Specifically, if you pass an integer to bytes() it will attempt to allocate and zero-initialise a buffer of that size. It uses operator.index() to check for integers.

This creates a problem, because ipaddress objects currently implement __index__ so they can be treated as integers without an explicit cast.

This does very bad things if, say, you do "bytes(ipaddress.IPv4Address('192.168.0.1'))"

If I remove the __index__ implementation, then you can't call hex() directly on ipaddress objects anymore - you have to call hex(int(addr)) instead.

I'm a *lot* happier with that approach, and will be implementing it in a moment.

New changeset 5abea8a43f19 by Nick Coghlan in branch 'default':
Close #15559: Implementing __index__ creates a nasty interaction with the bytes constructor. At least for 3.3, ipaddress objects must now be explicitly converted with int() and thus can't be passed directly to the hex() builtin.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/5abea8a43f19

I changed the precedence now, so __bytes__ is tried before __index__.