Hi, currently most of the applications that must take care of endianess use ntohl/htonl ntohs/htons functions. When the size of the integer change we need to change between the -s and -l functions (or maybe remove the call for chars). I'm wondering if two template functions would improve the maintenability of the code. template <typename T> T host_to_network(T v); template <typename T> T network_to_host(T v); template <> long host_to_network<long>(long v) {return htonl(v);} template <> long network_to_host<long>(long v) {return ntohl(v);} template <> short host_to_network<long>(short v) {return htons(v);} template <> short network_to_host<long>(short v) {return ntohs(v);} we will need to add specialization for all the other integer types, and we can also include char and unsigned char template <> char host_to_network<char>(char v) {return v;} template <> char network_to_host<char>(char v) {return v;} Do you think that these template functions should be included in boost? Best regards, Vicente