I was amused by this: http://www.steike.com/code/useless/evil-c/
I particularly liked the "internalEndianMagic". I see this in some XML libs, as well as GMP and other open sourced code. http://unix.derkeiler.com/Newsgroups/comp.unix.programmer/2005-12/msg00198.html From: https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/src/extra/trio/trionan.c /* * Endian-agnostic indexing macro. * * The value of internalEndianMagic, when converted into a 64-bit * integer, becomes 0x0706050403020100 (we could have used a 64-bit * integer value instead of a double, but not all platforms supports * that type). The value is automatically encoded with the correct * endianess by the compiler, which means that we can support any * kind of endianess. The individual bytes are then used as an index * for the IEEE 754 bit-patterns and masks. */ #define TRIO_DOUBLE_INDEX(x) (((unsigned char *)&internalEndianMagic)[7-(x)]) static TRIO_CONST double internalEndianMagic = 7.949928895127363e-275; #endif pretty weird stuff.
