[ntar-workers] Generic Comments on NTAR format

[Jose M. Gonzalez]

Michael Richardson wrote:
>     Loris> This is a good idea, but:
> 
>     Loris> - some blocks, like the SHB, cannot have arbitrary codes:
>     Loris> they need magic numbers to handle big endian vs little endian
>     Loris> issues (we discussed quite a lot about this last year on
I assume here you're thinking about whether using 0xa1b2c3e4 or "ENDI" is 
the best approach for the magic number in the SHB body. 

If you're referring to the block type in an SHB block header, I'm lost. 
I'm not sure whether I understand what difference endianness makes here. 
Either if we use 4-byte integers or 4 1-byte ASCII chars, a parser can't 
guess the block type until it knows the dumper endianness. 

BTW, if you assume the first 4 bytes in the file correspond always to an 
SHB block type, then you can also get the endianness from there. Not 
sure it's worth, though. 

Regards. 
-Chema