Since I do a lot of networking stuff, I often come to a point,
where the ip address alone is not enough.
I need very often the netmask / CIDR.
Sometimes I also need the gateway.
SInce there is already a 'problem' with IPv6 addresses (a buffer/structure is behind the scene)
It would make sense to return a string or (always) a pointer to a structure instead of the IP.
