Why does MacOSX try to resolve zero padded IP addresses as host names?

"Translation from a string to an address is usually performed by the POSIX function getaddrinfo(). This function first checks for a numeric IP address using inet_addr(), and if that fails it will then attempt to resolve the string as a domain name. inet_addr() interprets numbers with a leading 0 as octal, so for example 010 would become 8, and 019 would be an error (and would therefore be resolved as a domain name). The same behavior occurs on Linux and Solaris as well.

From getaddrinfo():

If the specified address family is AF_INET or AF_UNSPEC, address strings
using Internet standard dot notation as specified in inet_addr() are valid.

From inet_addr():

All numbers supplied as parts in IPv4 dotted decimal notation may be decimal, octal, or hexadecimal, as specified in the ISO C standard (that is, a leading 0x or 0X implies hexadecimal; otherwise, a leading '0' implies octal; otherwise, the number is interpreted as decimal).

Note the address 192.168.8.254 in parentheses:

$ ping 192.168.010.254
PING 192.168.010.254 (192.168.8.254): 56 data bytes
Request timeout for icmp_seq 0"