Beman Dawes wrote:
A refresh of the .zip file for the Endian library, based on comments received so far, is available at http://mysite.verizon.net/~beman/endian-0.2.zip
The docs are online at http://mysite.verizon.net/~beman/endian-0.2/libs/endian/index.html
I see that enum endianness have a 'native' option. This looks a bit weird to me. If I want to use native endianness, why should I use a class named 'endian'? Very unintuitive... What I'm suggesting is exactly what I suggested before (and obviously failed to convince): There should be a set of Integer types for various sizes/alignments, which could be used without any relation to endianness (which probably means native endianness, just as using a simple 'int' or 'uint32_t' means native endianness). These types could then be wrapped in a big_endian or little_endian class, if the arbitrary native endianness is not desired. Maybe this time I did a better job of convincing... Other stuff: - I think that using bits numbering is better than bytes, because a) uniformity with the types in <cstdint> is *very* important, IMO and b) as some noted, the size of a char is not necessarily 8 bits (so help me God if I understand why this is more useful than harmful), so bits numbering is less ambiguous than bytes (and maybe this is the reason why it was chosen to be used in <cstdint>). Actually, it just occurred to me that if portability between different platforms (with different CHAR_BITS) is our main concern here, then it *must* be bits, isn't it? - Is aligned more common than unaligned, or vice-versa? It sounds logical to me, that since the POD integers types (int and friends) are aligned, it should also be the 'default' behavior of any class mimicking them, including of course, the endian class. The conclusion is that instead of prefixing 'a' or 'aligned_' to the aligned types, the unaligned types should get a prefix ('unaligned_'?). - Having an enum with values such as 'big', 'aligned_big', 'little', 'aligned_little', etc, just cries for separation. The enum should have only 'big' and 'little', and the endian template can accept one more template argument - 'bool aligned'. I hope this post didn't sound too criticizing. That's not what I meant. I only wanted to thank you a lot for putting the effort of writing it, and present my humble comments. Yuval