At 04:48 AM 7/12/2004 +0000, you wrote:

> > ...or a gotcha, if you discover that your existing numeric data are
>wrong,
> > because of Endianness differences. A number stored on an
>architecture that
> > practises Little Endian will be arse-over-turkey on a system that
>practises
> > Big Endian. I don't know whether Mac is Little E or Big E but I do know
> > that I would want to find out before file-copying a database.
> >
> > ./hb
>
>you meant 'e' as in exponential? 1e19? or 1E19?

No, E as in Endian, i.e. whether the architecture stores numbers with the
most significant bytes at the lowest (start of) memory address (Big Endian)
or with the least significant bytes at the lowest address (Little
Endian). You can understand the problems if your data were stored on a
Little Endian system, like ix86, and file-copied to a Big Endian system
like Sparc, ppc or a JVM ---and, according to this article, the Motorola
processors used in Macs.

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~verts/cs32/endian.html

>OMG, sounds like a pit hole. thanks for the warning sign.

Well, Mac-to-Mac shouldn't be a problem.

./hb