struct sockaddr rant

When I look in netinet/in.h on my system it's defined with the type uint32_t. Over here (http://www.beej.us/guide/bgnet/output/html/multipage/sockaddr_inman.html) it's defined as an unsigned long. Why wouldn't they do what they did with IPv6 addresses and just using an array of chars? If they're already using the assumption that CHAR_BIT is 8 for IPv6, why carry the extra, unnecessary assumption that the implementation provides a 32-bit integer type?

The only reason I can really think of is to ensure portability to platforms that use larger chars, but since they aren't going to work with IPv6 structs, why not redesign IPv4 structs?

And if we're fixing that, why not change the following functions:

uint32_t htonl(uint32_t hostlong);
uint32_t ntohl(uint32_t netlong);

to something like:

void *htonl(void *dest, unsigned long val);
unsigned long ntohl(const void *src);

/end rant

>>29
you convert an LE 24-bit integer to BE and the unsigned long is 32 bits wide
I think you're under the impression that the C environment takes the endianness of the host environment into account. It doesn't since '1 << 1' will yield the value '2' in every single conforming implementation. Think of it like this:

ptr[0] = val / 65536;
ptr[1] = val / 256;
ptr[0] = val;

ptr[0] * 65536 + ptr[1] * 256 + ptr[0]

This is exactly the same as what I wrote in the previous post. a << x is equivalent to a dividied by (two raised to the power of x).