Just another thing I was wondering about. Given JAUS is a "standard [that] avoids technology or system implementation details" (a 2007 presentation) it seems a bit counter-intuitive to be using a little-endian representation for reading data. Would it not be possible to use an endian-neutral approach such as suggested in: www.intel.com/design/intarch/papers/endian.pdf

Or perhaps it would be too abstract or complicated for practical implementation...

When serializing data for transport, you are forced to choose a little or big endian format. JAUS chose to use little-endian. The decision was made a long time before I got involved, so I'm not sure what the exact reason was.

In implementation, it is possible to use an endian neutral approach by doing runtime checks of the host system endianness. OpenJAUS compromised by using a compile-time selection.