Re: Network.Socket endian problem?

On 12/14/06, Tomasz Zielonka wrote:

On Thu, Dec 14, 2006 at 05:22:43PM +0100, Ferenc Wagner wrote:

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Tomasz Zielonka writes:

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Who agrees with me that it would be nice if network libraries used host byte order in their interface? Or at least they could use an abstract data type, whose byte order would be unobservable.

Why is this trapdoor present in the C library?

I don't know. Maybe for efficiency?

The only mention I could find related to this is in W. Richards Stevens' "Unix Network Programming": "In theory an implementation could store the fields in a socket address structure in host byte order and then convert to and from the network byte order when moving the fields to and from the protocol headers, saving us from having to worry about this detail. But both history and Posix.1g specify that certain fields in the socket address structures be maintained in network byte order." Not very satisfactory. But even if the socket address details were hidden, the data itself may require a certain endianness. The htonl(), et al. functions assist in this detail for C programmers. I didn't see any functions in the Haskell Network or Marshall libraries that help Haskell programmers write out network byte order values. I didn't check any third party libraries yet. -- Rich AIM : rnezzy ICQ : 174908475