gcc issues warnings when encountering multicharacter constants, so we'll
simply emulate them in a manner works portably. The code assumes we are
using a little-endian machine - the real solution would be using using four
chars instead of an enum.
The name of the global variable conflicts with the deprecated gamma function
from <math.h> on some systems. Additionally the variable appears to be
unused - should it rather just be deleted from the codebase?