portable binary io, or, solving the byte order problem

[Dave Martindale]

Why do you pick the high-byte-first order as the example of a standard?
Low-byte-first seems just as natural, and would be more efficient on
the most common UNIX machines (DEC hardware).

If you are going to produce something really portable, you should come
up with some way of dealing with 6, 7, 9, and 10-bit bytes and word lengths
which may be neither a multiple of 8 nor a multiple of the byte size.