ikegami,

With all due respect, the topic is not about Perl's definition of byteorder, but the definition of and examples for little-endian and big-endian in the on-line documentation for Perl's 'pack' function. Perl's byteorder is academic! Please see the following from a RS/6000 with AIX 5.2 operating system:

pyrperl -v

This is perl 5, version 12, subversion 2 (v5.12.2) built for aix

Copyright 1987-2010, Larry Wall

Perl may be copied only under the terms of either the Artistic License
+ or the
GNU General Public License, which may be found in the Perl 5 source ki
+t.

Complete documentation for Perl, including FAQ lists, should be found 
+on
this system using "man perl" or "perldoc perl".  If you have access to
+ the
Internet, point your browser at http://www.perl.org/, the Perl Home Pa
+ge.
[download]

and

pyrperl -V:byteorder

byteorder='4321';
[download]

and

pyrperl -e '$p=pack("N",16909060); print unpack("H8",$p),"\n";'

01020304
[download]

Until now, I did not know that the RS/6000 has a software switch on the motherboard to indicate running in little-endian or big-endian. When I read the Camel book, and it said that the "N" parameter of 'pack' put the result in Network or big-endian format, I knew what that meant and it didn't have an example. My original problem was with the on-line documentation.

In goggling this, many authors seem to be guessing!

Regards...Ed