Re: Determining machine endian-ness

[mallors(at)crazyhorse.msfc.nasa.gov (Robert S. Mallozzi)]

In article <EvBpCE.Hru@midway.uchicago.edu>,
	rivers@cars3.uchicago.edu (Mark Rivers) writes:
> 
> Is there a way to determine whether the machine on which IDL is executing is
> big endian or little endian?  I am trying to read a data file which I know
> contains little-endian data.  I need to byte swap this data if IDL is running 
> on a big-endian machine, but not byte-swap if it is running on a little-endian
> machine.
> 
> It would be nice there were a field in !VERSION which contained this
> information.  Right now I am testing if !VERSION.ARCH eq 'x26', 'alpha', etc.
> There must be a better way.
> 

Hi,

I think this should do it:

    LITTLE_ENDIAN = (BYTE (1, 0, 1))[0]

    IF (LITTLE_ENDIAN) THEN $
       PRINT, "I'm little endian"
   

-- 
Robert S. Mallozzi
http://cspar.uah.edu/~mallozzir/