[boost] Re: BOOST_BIG_ENDIAN

From: Andrei Alexandrescu \(See Website for Email\) (andrewalex_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-07-24 11:02:51

"John Maddock" <john_at_[hidden]> wrote in message
news:037801c4716d$6d3c9f80$d6390252_at_fuji...
> I think this one has come up before: in general there is no way tell what
> the endianness is without doing a runtime test,

It would be nice to have a header that does a runtime test in debug mode to
make sure the macro is properly defined.

> there's also the problem
> that there are more than two orderings possible, for example
> for 4 byte types the byte ordering could be any of:
>
> 1 2 3 4
> 4 3 2 1
> 2 1 4 3
> 3 4 1 2

Really? I only knew of machines with 2 orderings. What machines use the
others?

Andrei