The only thing I want to guarantee is that blockwrite followed by
blockread on a platform with the same endianness works and will work
in the future.
This (combined with ifdef based endian conversion) guarantees
portability of structures to any platform.
Or do I see this wrong?
IMHO, I do think this not enough.
ADAIK, there is an FP version for a high endian processor (68K); more
can be crafted any time. It should be made easy to create communication
systems independent of the architecture. Of course you can't have binary
compatibility with all values by default (due to performance
considerations), but if we do have a "bitpacked" type that is not
optimized for speed but for structure, it should be possible to use it
for that purpose.
Moreover communication via structures in a documented layout is very
often needed (Network, files, hardware, ...). There should be an easy
way to craft a record type according to such a documentation, may if be
documented to hold it's multi-byte values in high or low endian
representation. "bitpacked" did open this box of Pandora and it's an
obvious request to go all the way :) .
(e.g.: TCP/IP defines high-endian, while PC's work low endian
internally, so everything needs to be converted.)
-Michael
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