Why do I need to care about BIG_ENDIAN or LITTLE_ENDIAN?

After that 400++ line procedure, that phd student is again throw me codes that carry all the "<<", ">>", "|" and "&". It compiles nicely on Sun, but segfault on intel machine. It was though to be the problem of BIG_ENDIAN and LITTLE_ENDIAN. I was just thinking, why can't we code in the normal, human-readable way?

-- mr blog