is inet:gethostbyname( IP ) correct?

[Garry Hodgson]

recently, a bug in my code caused us to pass a string
representing a floating point number to inet:gethostbyname().
i would have expected it to return an error, but instead it
returned an ip address, but one that made no sense to me:

1> inet:gethostbyname( '12.27' ).
{ok,{hostent,"12.27",[],inet,4,[{12,0,0,27}]}}

so my question is, is this behavior correct, and if so, what
exactly does it mean that a lookup of '12.27' maps to '12.0.0.27'?

thanks

-- 
Garry Hodgson
Lead Member of Technical Staff
AT&T Chief Security Office (CSO)

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