Determining machine endian-ness

[rivers(at)cars3.uchicago.edu (Mark Rivers)]

Is there a way to determine whether the machine on which IDL is executing is
big endian or little endian?  I am trying to read a data file which I know
contains little-endian data.  I need to byte swap this data if IDL is running 
on a big-endian machine, but not byte-swap if it is running on a little-endian
machine.

It would be nice there were a field in !VERSION which contained this
information.  Right now I am testing if !VERSION.ARCH eq 'x26', 'alpha', etc.
There must be a better way.

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