Is Python type safe?

[Nicolas Fleury]

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.

Maybe the guy was thinking about writing to a file, but your way using a 
short is the best I know of...