Re: AC_C_BIGENDIAN vs. Darwin

[Ed L Cashin]

Russ Allbery <address@hidden> writes:

> Mike Castle <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > Personally, I'd vote for getting rid of AC_C_BIGENDIAN.  No need to in
> > supporting poor programming.
> 
> I use it to allow more optimized versions of algorithms like MD5 where you
> can skip additional memory copies on hosts with some endianness.  I'd be
> pretty unhappy if it disappeared.

Yes, cryptographic operations often need to know byte order, and if
you have to support a file format which explicitly specifies an
endian-ness (instead of using hton* functions) so that the file can be
shared across platforms with different byte orders, then you are not
necessarily a poor programmer.

Of course it's a good thing to avoid writing code that depends on byte
order, but it's kind of naive and pedantic to claim no one will ever
legitimately need to care about byte order.

-- 
--Ed Cashin                   PGP public key:
  address@hidden       http://www.terry.uga.edu/~ecashin/pgp/