Decimal and, only the best mathematicians were able to multiply or divide large numbers. These difficulties were completely solved with the introduction of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system for representing integers. This system has been extended to represent some non-integer numbers, called "decimal fractions" or "decimal numbers" for forming the "decimal numeral system". For writing numbers, the decimal system uses ten decimal digits, a decimal mark, and, for negative numbers, a minus sign "−". The decimal digits are 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9; the decimal separator is the dot "" in many countries (including English speaking ones),
Dot-decimal notation table in RFC 790 ("Assigned Numbers") used the dotted decimal format, zero-padding each number to three digits. RFC 1123 ("Requirements for Internet Hosts – Application and Support") from October 1989 mentions a requirement on host software to accept “IP address in dotted-decimal ("#.#.#.#") form”, although it notes “[t]his last requirement is not intended to specify the complete syntactic form for entering a dotted-decimal host number”. A separate IETF draft to define textual representation of IP addresses expired. A popular implementation of IP networking, originating in 4.2BSD, contains a function "inet_aton()" for converting IP addresses in character string representation to internal