Date: Tue, 3 Feb 2004 11:38:04 +0100 From: Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd@FreeBSD.org> To: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@phk.freebsd.dk> Cc: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Size-independent byte order swapping functions. Message-ID: <20040203103804.GP4200@garage.freebsd.pl> In-Reply-To: <6923.1075802515@critter.freebsd.dk> References: <20040203083444.GM4200@garage.freebsd.pl> <6923.1075802515@critter.freebsd.dk>
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--U+NfgObvpQT1Q9Yq Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-2 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable On Tue, Feb 03, 2004 at 11:01:55AM +0100, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote: +> >I'm planning to commit this patch: +> > +> > http://garage.freebsd.pl/patches/endian.h.patch +>=20 +> I have a hard time seeing a sensible use for these. +>=20 +> Endianess conversion is almost exclusively used in communications +> (even if the "transmission media" is a disk), and I can't possibly +> see how it can make sense to be lax about wordsize but strict about +> byteordering. +>=20 +> Could you please tell us what you need these for and why you could +> not use the explicitly sized families of endian functions ? I found them very useful while doing many such translations. It protect from problems when you need to manage many such transformations. For example, you have some structure: struct mystruct { uint16_t ms_foo; uint32_t ms_bar; uint64_t ms_foobar; }; and many places where you translate those fields. Suddenly, you need to change size of one of those fields. If you were using size-independent functions you don't need to change anything else, in other case diff will be much bigger with much mistake probability. Of course if only I found them useful, I'll stop right here. --=20 Pawel Jakub Dawidek http://www.FreeBSD.org pjd@FreeBSD.org http://garage.freebsd.pl FreeBSD committer Am I Evil? Yes, I Am! --U+NfgObvpQT1Q9Yq Content-Type: application/pgp-signature Content-Disposition: inline -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (FreeBSD) iD8DBQFAH3oMForvXbEpPzQRAkgSAJ9rg3kBVfmhUickNVTBzmjVr/JuXACePni+ +mRCAQGmosK4MC8Em204nxI= =xx5e -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --U+NfgObvpQT1Q9Yq--
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