Inet_pton is the official NetBSD address conversion, from the ASCII
representation of the dot.quad IPv4 address or the colon-separated
version of the IPv6 address to a binary internal value.

I suspect it loses the ability to grasp 127.1 as the localhost address,
but I'm not entirely sure.

It does work considerably more reliably than the equivalent code in
inet_addr.c which it replaces.  It provides inet_aton() which is a
bit more fragile and seemingly deprecated.

Essential to the implementation of the OpenLDAP client tools.