I've been over this a few times in my head, but it still seems like just a naming convention to me. I suppose in the table the default route is recorded as a network, since it is really for more than one address, but when you are specifying the command you're specifying a host, not a network. The fact that some modern systems rewrite this to use the gateway parameter with the net keyword is fine, but the old syntax has always worked, should continue to work, and I do not think will wind up adding a single host route (otherwise the "default" keyword would be being ignored). So I think Tom was wrong on that point. However, I also misread what Tom wrote (due to the different terminology conventions) and thought he was suggesting one would specify a network *parameter*, not a host *parameter*, when specifying a default route. And that's what I was trying to clear up.
Bruce