>If you take a look at the CORBA 2.0 IP transport IIOP it takes the view
>of letting the receiver work out the endianness. This gives a gain in
>a network of same achitecture machines. You only convert when you
>have to. I think this is how filesystems should be.

indeed!  but this is not the first place.  x protocol has been doing
this longer, with a mechanism whereby the client tells the server what
it's endianness is, and leaves it up to the server to byteswap if it
needs to to talk to the client (modulo large amounts of image data
that the client itself must byteswap).  the first character sent from
the client to the server after connecting to the server's socket it
either a little l (l) or a big b (B) that indicates it's endianness.

i guess x doesn't work too goodly on middle-endian machines without
hacks in the client-side code.

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