[Orekit Developers] JPL ephemerides files endianness detection

[MAISONOBE Luc <luc.maisonobe@c-s.fr>]

Hello,

I am currently cleaning up code, removing checkstyle, findbugs and  
javadoc warnings. In the process, I noticed the following problem.

The latest JPL ephemerides loader class includes a binary file  
endianness detection, which I think was ported from calceph. Detection  
is based on the following statement:

// simple heuristic: if the read value is larger than half the range  
of an integer
//                 assume the file is in little-endian format
if ((deNum & 0xffffffffL) > (1 << 15)) {
     bigEndian = false;
}

where deNum is an int.

Findbugs complains about the test, it consider it is a "Check for sign  
of bitwise operation", explained here:  
<http://findbugs.sourceforge.net/bugDescriptions.html#BIT_SIGNED_CHECK>.

I think that we could get rid of the error by removing the bit mask in  
the test as follows:

if (deNum > (1 << 15)) {
     bigEndian = false;
}

Since deNum is an int and Java ints are known to be 32 bits, I think  
the mask does not serve any purpose. I didn't look at calceph code,  
but think such a test is useful when using uint64 C type or similar.

Does anybody has an opinion about this ?

Luc

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