[fpc-pascal] Endian issues when porting FPC programs from x86 to other platforms

[Bo Berglund]

I am writing a serial communications program, which will connect to a
data acquisition instrument and download data. I am using FPC/Lazarus
in order to make the program platform independent so it can be
deployed also on an embedded Linux system even though it is developed
on Windows or Ubuntu on an x86 machine.

My problem is that the data downloaded are basically memory dumps of
an array of measure point records where the record contains various
data types including single precision floats, multi-byte integers and
character arrays. The instrument contains a Motorola microcontroller
so its endian is opposite that of the typical Windows PC.
When I wrote my Windows only program in Delphi 7 I had to introduce
swap functions to correct the endian of the various values after
downloading the memory dump. This worked fine but was a bit tedious to
do....

Now, however, the problem may be complicated because the program may
well run on a CPU that is using the *same* endian structure as the
original instrument in which case of course the swaps should not be
done.
So I need some detector or other to decide if swaps are needed.
Is there some commonly used function to handle this or is there some
conditional directive one can use to control the compiler to "do the
right thing" depending on the target CPU endian?

Or maybe this is a moot question if FPC is only so far running on
platforms that have the same endian as x86 CPU:s? I have no
information on this though...

I can see at least these targets:
- Windows and Linux on x86 CPU:s
- Embedded Linux on ARM CPU:s


Bo Berglund