"Young, Michael" <Michael.Young@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Detecting endianness at compile time - IIRC, some CPUs (MIPS and Alpha > come to mind) are configurable to support either. Does anyone have any > links for details on this? (I quickly googled for it but came up > short.) I don't know if it is hardware or software configurable, and, > if it is the latter, if it's on a per-thread basis, and/or if it can be > configured by non-supervisor code. Anyway, depending on these details, > it may be "dangerous" to assume an endianness at compile-time - or am I > really missing the mark here? In theory, you are right. IBM's dreaded "PowerPC / OS/2 Personality" project allowed incredible mixtures - it failed, for precisely the reasons that I and a few others told IBM it would do. In practice, any platform (i.e. combination of hardware architecture and operating system) has a fixed endianness for integers. Floating point we have already gone into. Regards, Nick Maclaren, University of Cambridge Computing Service, New Museums Site, Pembroke Street, Cambridge CB2 3QH, England. Email: nmm1@xxxxxxxxx Tel.: +44 1223 334761 Fax: +44 1223 334679
