Big-endian Gcc on Intel IA32

[Florian Weimer]

dewar@gnat.com writes:

> This is a much trickier language feature to design than you would
> imagine.  We have been struggling with this in Ada for a while.

Yes, in the general case, this is of course right.  But for two's
complement, octet-adressed machines, endian representation clauses for
discrete types could be implemented without major problems, I think,
at least if you restrict yourself to the little/big endian case and
ignore PDP endian.

The general case (which has to include processors with, say, 18 bit
storage units) is much harder, of course.