>>>>> On Thu, 16 Oct 2008, Dan Nicolaescu wrote:

> On all the machines that I am aware off that support both big and
> little endian the compiler predefines a symbol to distinguish
> between them.

It turns out that gcc defines __LITTLE_ENDIAN__ and __BIG_ENDIAN__,
respectively:

   $ echo | sh4-gentoo-linux-uclibc-gcc -nostdinc -dM -E - | grep ENDIAN
   __LITTLE_ENDIAN__

(To add some confusion, endian.h then also defines _all_ four of
__LITTLE_ENDIAN, LITTLE_ENDIAN, __BIG_ENDIAN, and BIG_ENDIAN,
regardless of the machine's byte sex. Go figure.)

> I'll install this when the endianess issue gets resolved.

I still think that my previous approach (include sys/param.h and
test for __BYTE_ORDER) was cleaner. But if you absolutely want a
compiler-defined symbol, an updated patch is included below.

Ulrich