[Haskell-cafe] Endian conversion

[Mark Carroll]

On Mon, 3 Oct 2005, Joel Reymont wrote:

> On Oct 3, 2005, at 6:51 AM, Marc Ziegert wrote:
> 
> > data (Integral a) => BigEndian a = BigEndian a deriving  
> > (Eq,Ord,Enum,...)
> > be = $( (1::CChar)/=(unsafePerformIO $ with (1::CInt) $ peekByteOff  
> > `flip` 0) ) :: Bool
> 
> Will this always correctly determine if the platform is big-endian?  
> How does it actually work?

I don't know, having not used things like peekByteOff, but my suspicion
would be that it's rather like,

  typedef char byte;

  char cChar = 1;
  int cInt = 1;
  int be = cChar != *(((byte*) &cInt) + 0);

  printf("be = %i\n", be);

  return 0;

in C, so it's looking to see if the first byte of the int representation
of 1 isn't 1.

-- Mark