@koakuma Shifts and masks aren't the point. The point is that you are saying "I put my high bits here and my low bits here", explicitly, rather than saying "I'll copy or swap whatever order my CPU happens to have".

Byte "swapping" implies that you know what your native endianness is. You shouldn't. Ideally the language shouldn't allow you to find out, directly or indirectly, what the byte layout of your word is.

@chjara @lanodan