Re: Big Endian - Little Endian

From:
James Kanze <james.kanze@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Sun, 31 Aug 2008 09:38:16 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID:
<033bc899-8af0-4910-b581-d46614d7ad08@c65g2000hsa.googlegroups.com>
On Aug 31, 2:38 pm, Juha Nieminen <nos...@thanks.invalid> wrote:

James Kanze wrote:

  (OTOH, would endianess have any meaning in a system where they have
the same size?)


Does it really have any meaning internally even when the sizes
are different?


If you write some values to a file eg. with fwrite(), it can
make a difference.


I'm afraid I don't understand. fwrite() really doesn't do
anything that ostream::write() doesn't; it just has an interface
which pretends to. If you have to reread the file at some
future date, possibly with a different program, or a new version
of the same program, then you have to write (and read) a
specified format. Neither fwrite() nor ostream::write() do
this; neither really make much sense unless the argument is a
preformatted buffer (except for the case where you are using the
file as extended memory within the program---frequent back in
the days of 8 or 16 bit processors, and a total memory of only
64 KB, but I can't imagine the need today, with 64 bits virtual
address space).

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