One reason why is for the case where you are presented with an address text like "180.076.006.001",

Of note is that that isn't the same IP. v4 addresses by convention work like C-style numeric constants, so a leading 0 means it's in octal:

% ping 180.076.006.001
PING 180.076.006.001 (180.62.6.1): 56 data bytes
[download]

(just one of the many scary things you can do with v4 addresses...)