On 26 May 2014, at 20:28, Charles Srstka <[email protected]> wrote:
> On May 26, 2014, at 7:43 PM, Uli Kusterer <[email protected]> 
> wrote:
>> Regarding endian-swapping, that depends on the file format. If you wrote 
>> that file yourself, you don’t usually need to do any swapping.
> 
> That's true. For example, back in the PowerPC days, we never had to 
> endian-swap our file formats, because we knew that our file format was 
> created on a Mac, and Macs always used big-endian, and it wasn't as if Apple 
> was ever going to do anything crazy like switch to Intel or anything.

 Or change struct alignment or the size of ints or … I’ve been programming for 
a couple of days, I’ve taken this into account. But I’d rather retroactively go 
and fix something (you have to re-test when porting to a new platform anyway) 
than go all architecture astronaut and prepare for changes in ABI that may or 
may never happen. In a well-architected code-base, the code that is affected by 
endian-ness is separate from the other code anyway. 

 Also, endian-ness did not change in the switch from 680x0 to PowerPC for 
instance, so in my book that was just a fluke. :-p

 That said, if you want to be really endian-safe, use an XML file format saved 
as UTF-8 like Property Lists. Most portable format there is. :-)

Cheers,
-- Uli Kusterer
“The Witnesses of TeachText are everywhere...”
http://zathras.de


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