IP Conversion

I was recently reading through a security paper on packet storm security's website talking about some general security related topics. In a second about "tunneling" firewalls it discussed a way to convery IPV4 addresses into non-octet decimal form. Here's the link:

http://www2.packetstormsecurity.org/...us&faq=defined

It provided the following formula to convert the IP address 199.227.88.145 to 3353565329:

32(8) = 256
|_SEG1(199)*256^3
|
SEG2(227)*256^2_+
|
SEG3(88)*256_+
|
SEG4(145)_+
|
145_+ -= 3353565329 (new identifier)

I was wondering if someone would not mind explaining this more in depth and perhaps explain how to make the same conversion because the document was extremely vague or at least I can't figure it out. If someone could just tell me what this alternative form is called so I could look up more information on it, it'd be appriciated.

i think that is too complicate. Why not just convert all from dotted to hexadecimal form and AFTER convert to decimal format?
199.227.88.145 ==> C7.E3.58.91 ==> C7E35891 ==> 3353565329

Obviouslly, its the same idea of your example but.....