> For example, if I wanted to read a little endian 32-bit integer value from a byte stream, I could write a function like this But for the longest time people

> For example, if I wanted to read a little endian 32-bit integer value from a byte stream, I could write a function like this But for the longest time people would basically dump the raw bytes of their structs from / to the network whenever possible, e.g. struct my_data { int foo, bar; float x,y,z; long dontdothat; } data; write_bytes_to_the_network((const unsigned char*) &data, sizeof(my_data));