title: Endianness of integers in Python
body: <p>I'm working on a program where I store some data in an integer and process it bitwise.  For example, I might receive the number 48, which I will process bit-by-bit.  In general the endianness of integers depends on the machine representation of integers, but does Python do anything to guarantee that the ints will always be little-endian?  Or do I need to check endianness like I would in C and then write separate code for the two cases?</p>
  
  <p>I ask because my code runs on a Sun machine and, although the one it's running on now uses Intel processors, I might have to switch to a machine with Sun processors in the future, which I know is big-endian.</p>