>>> 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.

Of course there is a lot of code that can be written without caring 
about endianness. In which case you wouldn't tell autoconf to do that check.

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