>> big endian without a formal proof - anyone to confim this?
> I don't know, it's not in the man page, and no one I ask knows.  If you
> want to write portable code, use network order.  It will be easier to

Here is documentation on the network byte-order conversion functions in the
GNU C Library.

http://www.gnu.org/manual/glibc-2.0.6/html_node/libc_200.html

_BIG_ENDIAN and _LITTLE_ENDIAN are macros provided by many compilers.  They
shouldn't be necessary if the htonl, htons, ntohl, and ntohs functions are
usable across platforms.

As a note: The network byte order is big endian.  Intel 16/32-bit 80x86 CPUs
are little endian; SUN SPARCs and Compaq Alpha are big endian; Motorola/IBM
PowerPC, Intel ArmStrong (8096x), Intel IA-64 (64-bit Pentium or whatever),
and other newer CPUs are swappable between big or little endian in hardware
depending on the operating system's requirements.  (Furthermore, 64-bit
Linux runs as little endian on IA-64 while it runs as big endian on Alpha
and SPARC.)

,David Norris

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