Hmmm, yes, I see a problem.  At the very least, I think we may be wanting some consistency between the acceptance of ints and longs.  Also, I think we should return an unsigned long instead of just a long (which can be negative).

I've got a patch right now to make htonl, ntohl, htons, and ntohs never return a negative number.  I'm rather waffling to the idea of whether we should accept negative numbers at all in any of the functions.  The behavior is undefined, and it is, afterall, better not to guess what a user intended.

However, consistency should be a desirable goal, and we should accept make the interface consistent for both ints and longs.

Mark