On Tue, Sep 26, 2006 at 09:00:33AM -0400, Samuel Bronson wrote:
How often do you need to do comparisons on addresses for anything but equality (which doesn't require flipping to test)?
I may want to see if a HostAddresses is in a certain range of addresses - for example, a range assigned by an one of internet registries. Here it's actually important what ordering relation we use. The current one is useless. I may want to use (Map HostAddress something) or (Set HostAddress). I may want to sort HostAddresses to remove duplicates.
The problem is everything that gives different results on platforms with different byte-orders. Show is one example, but there are also arithmetic operations, Ord, etc.
... How often do you need to do arithmatic?
Additions, multiplications... rather not. But Data.Bits operations can be useful to manipulate netmasks and network addresses.
Oh, btw, there are ntoh*/hton* functions for converting between host and network byte orders regardless of how crazy the host byte-order is...
Why not do it better? Network byte order is meant to be used over the *network*. It is unfortunate that BSD sockets don't hide that detail from the programmer. I think Haskell should be a bit above the level of IP frames. Do you have any good reasons to keep the current status besides: - "we don't want additional conversions" - "that's how it's done in C" - "you don't need it" ? Best regards Tomasz