On January 25, 2015 9:06:17 AM EST, Beman Dawes
big_to_native big_to_native_inplace native_to_big native_to_big_inplace little_to_native little_to_native_inplace native_to_little native_to_little_inplace conditional_reverse conditional_reverse_inplace
These are quite explicit, but are a bit too long and awkward for my taste. I'd be willing to change these names if someone can come up with replacements that are shorter and less awkward, but still reasonable explicit.
One option is to use "_copy" for the first set and remove "_inplace" for the others. I generally like "to" rather than "from" in names, but the types are usually distinct, so that doesn't work so well here. Peter's "from_big", et al, aren't bad, but not great, from that perspective, but don't distinguish between little and native as the target order. There's nothing in the functions or their arguments that will ensure the right one is used, however. The explicit naming may be of slight value in making one choose correctly initially, or helping a reviewer spot a mistake, but I'm inclined to adopt the traditional notion of network order being big endian so the source or target endianness can be implied (which is not unlike Peter's suggestion): to_host to_network "to_host" implies its argument is in network order, while "to_network" implies its argument is in host order. Add variants with copying and you're finished. If you want to avoid the implied ordering of the network data, then the argument our target can be assumed to be in host order. Thus: from_big to_big from_little to_little If the host order is little endian, "from_big" and "to_big" would swap the bytes. If the host is big endian, they would be noops. The others are similar. I don't see a separate need for the "conditional_reverse" functions, for the above suggestions, but if you keep them, I can't think of a better name. ___ Rob (Sent from my portable computation engine)