On 5/31/06, Beman Dawes <bdawes@acm.org> wrote:
Back in 1999 and 2000, there was discussion of a Boost Endian library to provided portable big and little endian integer types. I've dusted off some old code from Darin Adler, gotten his permission to use the new Boost license, and have put together a library.
Comments welcome!
Very interesting library. I've written something before with similar functionality, but using a rather different approach. I haven't tried it yet, jut here are a few comments from looking at the code and documentation: The link to http://mysite.verizon.net/example/example1.cpp is broken Why not expose the template implementation and remove the typedefs? Presumably Boost.Integer-style template manipulations could be used to find the appropriate storage types. I think the names for the types might be a little bit too cute. "bin" makes me think binary, not signed big-endian. That being said, I'm not sure I have any good name that isn't far too verbose. unsigned_littleendian_aligned<4> is admittedly starting to push convenience, though bigendian<5> isn't too bad. Some sort of size method would be nice so that out.write( reinterpret_cast<char*>(&big5), 5 ); could instead be out.write( reinterpret_cast<char*>(&big5), big5.size() ); to avoid the magic constant. I agree that operator<< cannot be used for binary output, but reinterpret_cast-and-write "smells" to me. What about using operator< or operator<=? They have similar precedence to << and >>, and are visually similar enough that the connection might be decently intuitive. Something involving & could also be nice, mirroring Serialisation, but I don't know of a good way of using anything with & in a nice way with a bidirectional stream without going the full Serialization framework route. ~ Scott McMurray