Dealing with Endian-ness?
OpenVMS VAX, OpenVMS Alpha and OpenVMS I64 (as well as all Microsoft Windows implementations) all support and all use the little-endian byte ordering. Certain Alpha microprocessors and certain Intel Itanium processors can be configured to operate in big-endian and potentially in bi-endian mode. HP-UX typically operates big-endian. With little-endian byte order, the least significant byte is always the first byte; the byte at the lowest address. With big-endian byte ordering, the byte storage order in memory is dependent on the size of the data (byte, word, longword) that is being referenced. Endian-ness is a problem has been solved many times before. Some of the typical solutions include htonl/htons and ntohl/ntohs in the standard C library and the TCP/IP Services XDR (eXternal Data Representation) libraries. One of the more recently introduced network formats, and one that is seeing extensive press and marketing coverage, is XML.