Hi
On 11/21/25 11:46, Alexandre Daubois wrote:
After rereading the threads and spending some time thinking about it
all, I propose a new version of this RFC aimed at adding Perl
modifiers. Indeed, this seems to be a better solution than the one
previously proposed, and several people seem to share this opinion.
The RFC URL is the same and its version has been bumped to 1.1:
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/pack-unpack-endianness-signed-integers-support
Looking forward to reading your feedback on this revision.
Thank you.
I only have one comment on
Initially, endianness modifiers will only be supported for signed integer
format codes (s, l, q) since unsigned integers already have dedicated
endian-specific letters.
While there are already dedicated alternatives, I feel that restricting
the new modifiers to the lowercase versions would be unnecessarily
restrictive. Since the RFC argues that:
2. Intuitive semantics: The < and > symbols visually suggest byte order
direction
which I agree with, the same argument applies to the uppercase QLS
versions. As a developer I would rather remember l> as "signed long
big-endian" and L> as "unsigned long big-endian" rather than N as
"4-byte network-byte order".
Since there is no inherent limitation or ambiguity with supporting
modifiers on QLS, I would suggest just allowing it. In fact I think my
PoC patch already supported them.
There's also a formatting issue of the “Rationale” in the “Proposed
Solution” section.
Best regards
Tim Düsterhus
