Hi Rob,

-=> Rob Swindell wrote to Bo Simonsen <=-

 > Could someone please give me a advice of what I should keep in mind,
 > then I won't to write Endian-less software?

 RS> I would recommend storing integers on disk in ASCII rather than binary.
 RS> A 32-bit integer stored as 8 hex characters will take up twice the
 RS> storage space as the binary equivalent, but it will have no endian
 RS> issues.

It's kinda hard to that with Fidonet packages. As I wrote to pascal I 
know that you need to do some bit-shifting to read a packed structure 
written by a little endian machine into a big endian machine.

 RS> If you are going to store integers on disk in binary (for storage or
 RS> performance reasons), then you will need to use intelligent macros to
 RS> convert to/from the native integer format for some platforms.

Exactly like:

#define get_dword(ptr) \
  ((dword)((byte)(ptr)[0]) | \
  (((dword)((byte)(ptr)[1])) << 8) | \
  (((dword)((byte)(ptr)[2])) << 16) | \
  (((dword)((byte)(ptr)[3])) << 24))

#define get_word(ptr) \
  (word) ((word)((byte)(ptr)[0]) | \
  (((word)((byte)(ptr)[1])) << 8 ))

For big endian?

Bo


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