Lpc2000

On Fri, Mar 31, 2006 at 02:20:12AM -0000, garycordelli wrote:
> Just a postscript: this is not an academic notion to which I allude,
> but a common error in just the kind of code I am paid to fix every day.
> 
> The circumstances tend to be communications code, where the programmer
> has created a generic n-byte buffer:

Indeed. I'd love to have a dollar for every time someone wrote such code,
then complained when the code doesn't port unchanged to a different architecture
or compiler.

The bottom line - if you want to *portably* encode/decode bytestreams of this
nature you have to do it one byte at a time. There is no other way to ensure
that the same code will work across different architectures. Wanna encode a
16 bit value as two sequential bytes? Do it like this:

	*cp++ = (val & 0xFF);
	*cp++ = (val >> 8) & 0xFF;

The masking is redundant, but makes it clear what you're doing, and will be
optimized away by any decent compiler.

Now if you happen to have code that someone naively wrote that only works
on one particular architecture - don't expect a compiler to save you. Just
bite the bullet, rewrite the code properly, and learn from the experience.
It will save you a LOT of time in the long run.