I think HostAddresses are probably good how they are now. It seems a bit too much work to convert a HostAddresses endianness everytime it's used. If the problem is how it appears (which along with PortAddress can be confusing) perhaps it just needs a different show implementation. I've attached some Byte utilities. I don't know if this would be considered useful to the Haskell libraries or not, but I find it useful for doing things like outputing raw binary and messing with endianness. It's poorly documented, but I can fix that if it's considered useful. On Sun, 2006-09-24 at 11:42 +0200, Tomasz Zielonka wrote:
I was thinking about it before. As of now, Network libraries just put bits in network order into values of type HostAddress = Word32. But Word32 is interpreted in host order by Haskell, so the same IP address will be seen as a different number on little and big endian platforms.
The best would be to have an endianness independent representation for IP4 addresses, by converting IP addresses to host order. This way things are simple - the most significant octet of IP address with be the most significant 8-bits of HostAddress, etc.
Conversion to/from network order could be done around calls to various system calls. Yes, it adds an (small) additional cost (on little endian machines), but I think it's worth it. With current design you sometimes can't avoid impure and/or inelegant code.
Best regards Tomasz
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Robert Marlow