1. A method for executing a load-swapped instruction, comprising: receiving the load-swapped instruction to be executed, wherein the load-swapped instruction specifies a source address in memory, which is possibly an unaligned address; and executing the load-swapped instruction, which involves loading a vector from a naturally-aligned memory region encompassing the source address, and in doing so rotating the bytes of the vector to cause the byte at the specified source address to reside at the least-significant byte position within the vector for a little-endian memory transaction, or causing said byte to be positioned at the most-significant byte position within the vector for a big-endian memory transaction.