One of my assignments in school was to translate IP addresses to different forms, determine how many IP addresses fit in a range, manually determine a router's output port given a lookup table of subnets and an address, and all that kind of stuff.
It's tedious and error-prone so the natural solution is to get the computer to do the grunt work.
Sorry, no IPv6 here. At the time IPv4 was still relevant and my assignments reflected that. Perhaps also it was shorter to calculate and my teacher wasn't sadistic.