Code like that second one (using shifts) is generally what I do always (dealing with small-endian, big-endian, or PDP-endian data), anyways. Hopefully, the comp

Code like that second one (using shifts) is generally what I do always (dealing with small-endian, big-endian, or PDP-endian data), anyways. Hopefully, the compiler will be able to optimize the code so that it works like the first one. (I don't know if the compiler actually does optimize it or not, though. However, it seems to me that a code like that should be common enough that it would make sense to implement such an optimization.)