type behavior of sys/endian.h

[David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

It came up recently (see source-changes-d) that ntohl and friends on
big-endian machines do not have the same type behavior as on
little-endian machines.

   uint32_t ntohl(uint32_t) __attribute__((__const__));
   uint32_t bswap32(uint32_t) __attribute__((__const__));

and one of

   #define      ntohl(x)        bswap32((uint32_t)(x))
   #define      ntohl(x)        (x)

If you do ntohl() on a signed value, whether the result is signed or
not is thus machine-dependent, and that seems like a bad idea.

So it seems to me that the BE definition of ntohl ought to be

   #define      ntohl(x)        ((uint32_t)(x))

and similarly for all the other various nops in sys/endian.h.

Or maybe they should be made inline functions instead so they don't
fail silently if passed pointers.

Comments?

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost