Byte Swapping

Even the best of human intentions can be circumvented. This is the case with the IEEE floating point data format. The implementation of the IEEE standard by chip manufacturers has resulted in two types of commonly encountered data types. These are called ``big-endian'' (high-byte) or ``little-endian'' (low-byte) types. Little-endian machines are Intel or Dec-based, whereas big-endian is every other chip manufacturer.

Transporting data (either regular floating point, or SU data) requires that the bytes be swapped, in order for the data to be read. Two issues are necessary to address. These are the issues of swapping the bytes in

• normal floating point data,
• SU data.

Two programs are provided to perform these tasks. These are

• SWAPBYTES - SWAP the BYTES of various data types
• SUSWAPBYTES - SWAP the BYTES in SU data to convert data from big endian