tossing bits/ Down By The Data

And now I moan,
And now I holler...
Big Endian, little endian, swimming in the water,
come back here, man, give me my data!

Who made the fortran record control word for 8-Byte data 4 Byte long? I know I can assign byteswapping to an I/O unit, but I'd have to add that feature to most of my programs. So I prefer to swap the data before I run them. And now I moan/And now I holler...