How does Yorick handle the different byte orders and floating point formats?
You asked how Yorick handles the problem: Partly by a compilation of the characteristics of known systems (such as yours), and partly by a small, portable C program which computes the required information. First, I’ll describe the program. It’s called fmcalc, and is in the Yorick subdirectory of the Yorick distribution (yorick-1.0.tar.gz at wuarchive.wustl.edu:languages/yorick or ftp-icf.llnl.gov:pub/Yorick). fmcalc is unrelated to the rest of Yorick; feel free to grab any part of it which interests you. The output of fmcalc is in the form of a header file which Yorick includes (obviously not directly useful to you). The section (4F.) in Yorick/doc/FILE_FORMATS summarizes my notation for byte order (order_value there), which does not cover an arbitrary permutation of bytes like your notation or Stewart Brown’s, but which covers all of the machines in your list. The byte order calculation in fmcalc is quite simple (most of the difficulty is in extracting the floating point encodings) wi
