I noticed ifdefs like this when I inherited some C code back in 2001. I'd always worked on x86 systems, so never really encountered machines with different byte orders. The code was fugly, and I didn't like it, so I studied it some and it hit me that it didn't matter what the byte order was. If I constructed a 32 bit int and assigned it to a 32 bit int, the compiler would take care of the byte order. All I needed to know was the byte order of the network protocol we were using.

Tested new code on my x86 box and it worked. Then just committed to sourceforge CVS and told the rest of the world to test. It worked. My code looked a lot like Rob's.