Re: Last stream problem: byte order

[Jeffrey Carter <jeffrey.carter@boeing.com>]

Erik Sigra wrote:
> 
> Now my stream application almost works. The last remaining problem seems to
> be byte order. The server is programmed in C++ with Qt and the client is
> programmed in Ada with adasockets-1.0. The last thing I did was to change the
> byte order in the server
> ("the_stream.setByteOrder(QDataStream::LittleEndian);"). After that the
> numbers came out right at the other end.
> 
> However, this may not be a safe solution. The safe way would probably be to
> always have the network communication in BigEndian format and make sure the
> client always obeys this, regardless of the platform.
> 
> So how does one set the byte order to BigEndian on the Ada side? Or is there
> a different, better idea?

If you want your code to deal with things with a specific byte order
regardless of the platform, you'll need to read individual bytes and put
them together properly, and decompose things into bytes and write them
in the appropriate order.

Since this requires explicit processing in your Ada code, it doesn't
really matter which endianness you choose, as long as everything uses
the same endianness.

-- 
Jeffrey Carter