The docs say:
Gets or sets the endian-ness of byte conversions to and from other primitive values.
The default for Android is Big_Endian, Windows PCs are Little_Endian.
However:
- In B4J (Windows x86) the value returns false by default and it should be true.
- The Android default should depend on the platform (ARM vs. x86), if it doesn't already.
- I assume that if you could ever get a B4J program installed to run on an ARM-based Win8 machine then it would also need to default to false.
- If you ran a B4J program on Linux-on-ARM (far from rare now) it would need to default to false.
By "need to" I mean it is often necessary to be able to determine what platform endianness you have at runtime in order to do proper mapping between host byte order and network byte order for a vast number of Internet protocols.
Frankly we might be better off if the Socket library provided methods such as htonl(), ntohl(), and friends as one would normally expect.
But perhaps I am missing something here, either the intent of this Property or my attempted usage of it.