>> Shouldn't the compiler be dealing with those issues?
> 
> No. If the compiler "dealt" with little endian and big endian, by making 
> the C code always see one or the other, it would make the other 
> architecture much slower.

What I meant was, shouldn't the programmer be able to just write their 
program, and let the compiler generate the correct code depending on the 
actual processor architecture?

But then, since C is little more than semi-portable machine code, I 
guess that would be quite hard to do.

> Also, the C standard only mentions minimum sizes for data types. A 
> compliant C implementation may have 64-bit bytes if it wants to.

IOW, the C standard is insane. ;-)

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