Portability vs. Endianness

[Dave Gillett]

In <2628 at ksr.com> jfw at ksr.com (John F. Woods) writes:

>	Bytes[0] = (var >> 24) & 0xFF;
>	Bytes[1] = (var >> 16) & 0xFF;
>	Bytes[2] = (var >> 8)  & 0xFF;
>	Bytes[3] =  var        & 0xFF;

>This code is guaranteed.


     I don't think that the standard guarantees that chars are eight bits.
I will agree that that's probably even more common than 4-byte longs, but
even this assumption about word sizes cannot, IMHO, be guaranteed to be
portable.  (6-bit and 9-bit chars have gone out of style, but I've used
machines with 16-bit word sizes that would *not* have produced the desired
result for this code.)
                                                 Dave