I think its sadder not that they don't know but don't bother our of sheer apathy and expect canned knowledge ready to be pumped into their minds on stack exchange or google.

That applies to the majority of 'knowledge' these days.

- hackers don't read source code

All one has to do is look at the source for ping and questions like these are answered.

I'll not look this up now, but I'm pretty sure that the answer is found in inlet_aton() in the c-library ping has been linked against, not ping.

I think you meant inet_aton() or inet_addr().

However, the value of looking at ping is it let's you see a simple example of a lot of networking system calls which you can then dig into. I had a class project to write a simple web-server and text based browser in C and ping was actually a great place to start.