25 Jul
2004
25 Jul
'04
10:18 a.m.
It gets worse. IA-64 supports switching endianness at runtime. :-) See e.g. http://developer.intel.com/design/itanium/manuals/245317.pdf section 4.4: "Accesses to memory quantities larger than a byte may be done in a big-endian or little-endian fashion. The byte order for all memory access instructions is determined by UM in the User Mask register."
The user mask can be changed at user-level program's discretion and thus isn't a function of the OS platform used either. I suppose the least incorrect thing to do here would be to define it depending on the default for the particular OS/compiler used.
Uh! That's definitely um, interesting. Anyone still want these macros? Thanks, John.