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From: " "@deneb.cygnus.argh.org (Florian Weimer)
Subject: Re: Decoding an octet stream
Date: 1999/12/01
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swhalen@netcom.com writes:

> I'll try to supress my disgust at how far the patent process
> has strayed from reality in the few years you've not been paying
> attention, but suffice to say our Patent Office has no clue as
> to what consitutes "prior art" or is "obvious" (at least in the
> software field). 

RFC 951 (the BOOTP protocol) mentions the term `standard network byte
order' as early as in 1985.  Of course, ntohl() and friends are just
another example of prior art.  According to Stevens' `UNIX Network
Programming', they already appeared in the VAX implementation of 4.2BSD
for the first time -- in 1983.  The Patent Office obviously didn't check
the prior art references of the patent application: the NFS documentation
is explicitly mentioned, and the XDR specification (RFC 1014, Jun 1987)
is more elaborated and deals with the same issues.  (And Sun considered
it to be their intellectual property afterwards, as it seems. ;)

BTW: The thread drifted quite far away from its original subject.
Perhaps I may ask again: Is it reasonable to assume that
Storage_Element'Size equals 8 (although the standard doesn't
require this, of course)?  And, looking at David's code, does
System.Default_Bit_Order really reflect the byte-ordering?