darcs patch: Implementation of aton and ntoa outside the IO monad

[Robert Marlow]

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
> 
-- 
Robert Marlow <bobstopper at bobturf.org>
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