Is Python type safe?

Carl Banks imbosol at aerojockey.invalid
Tue Mar 16 21:19:12 EST 2004


Roy Smith wrote:
> I was once asked on an interview how I would tell, inside of a C 
> program, if I was on a big endian or a small endian machine.  I said I'd 
> create a union of a long and a char[4], set the long equal to 1, and see 
> which char it showed up in.  The interviewer looked shocked, thought 
> about it for a while, and finally said something like, "yeah, I guess 
> that would work".
> 
> To this day, I have no idea what other plan he had in mind.


Here's my guess:

long i = 0;
*(short*)&i = 1;

if (i == 1) { printf("It's whatever one Intel uses.\n"); }
else { printf("It's the other one.\n"); }


-- 
CARL BANKS                      http://www.aerojockey.com/software
"If you believe in yourself, drink your school, stay on drugs, and
don't do milk, you can get work." 
          -- Parody of Mr. T from a Robert Smigel Cartoon



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