Hello Neil!

Replying to a message of Neil Heller to Darin McBride:

 DM>> While I would agree - if they are always numerics, the ideal would be
 DM>> to  store them as such, sometimes you don't get to control  these
 DM>> details.

 NH> If the numeric values are created a stored by a big endian system
 NH> while  the system reading the values from mass storage is little
 NH> endian,  storing the values as numerics (instead of character
 NH> representation)  leads to incorrect translation.

Only if they are read that way.  Going back a few years to '95, I was
involved in drivers that would read from both external devices that were
little endian and those that were big endian.  The trick was to know which
was which, and transform them if required to the current platform.

Much like what Java does internally.  Serialise a java object, and you
always get the same orientation (can't recall which).  Read it back on a
different platform, and the interpreter will automagically rearrange if
required.

Darin
C_PLUSPLUS moderator
dmcbride{at}tower.to.org

---