The issue is not the compiler, but the platform portability. If you're compiling on a Intel, it'll use MSB (Most significant bit) order; whereas, if you compile to an LSB platform, like Motorola 68k, you'll find the byte ordering to be a problem ONLY if you write bit structures to a file and transfer to the other platform.

After having written code for Palm handheld (68k), this is an obvious problem that is easily solved with functions (macros, actually) that swap byte order for words and dwords.

The portability of the code we're talking about is in the person writing the code, not the compiler. In other words, the examples presented work, but when writing to file streams, just be sure to write in the same standard byte order.