That is an interesting idea to detect the byte order at run-time instead
of build-time.  However, the build system (autoconf) is already checking
it before build-time.

Why is
	if (is_little_endian) {
	...
	}
better than
	#ifndef WORDS_BIGENDIAN
	...
	#endif
?

Cheers,

Ben

On Thu, Nov 18, 2004 at 05:29:47PM +0000, Richard Dobson wrote:
> Note that as an alternative to a forest of #ifdefs, it can all be done 
> programmatically. I got this from the SNDAN sources (I use in pvfileio.c 
> for reading PVOC_EX files), and  don't see why it wouldn't work just as 
> effectively with a 64bit int:
> 
> static int byte_order()					
> {						
>   int   one = 1;
>   char* endptr = (char *) &one;
>   return (*endptr);
> }
> 
> e.g:
> 
> int is_little_endian = byte_order();
> 
> Richard Dobson