Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: Linux/IA-64 byte order | Date | Wed, 10 Mar 1999 13:18:03 -0800 | From | Craig Milo Rogers <> |
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>> another, not just technical reasons. Networks were built by humans and >> debugged by humans. Quite frankly looking at raw network packets off of >> a wire is much easier to read if it's readable by humans (and, yes, this >> is exactly what I've done in the past). > >What is it with you people? > >LE and BE are completely made up constructs. Neither is better than the >other. > >If you want to look at network packets, nobody uses raw hex dumps. Or if >they do, they should sure as hell not use "readable" as an excuse for >doing so. ... >For the last time: big-endian is _NOT_ "better". Never has been, never >will be.
With all due respect, Linus, you've left the role of "arbitor of good taste" and entered into historical revisionism. I shall address the "never has been" portion of your assertation.
<geezer-mode>
I was (among other things) an ARPANet (later Internet) protocol programmer in the '70s and '80s. I used both LE and BE systems. Raw hex dumps (or octal dumps due to my TOPS-10 training) were the primary mode of debugging kernel data and networks (scoping the 1822 or RS-232C interface also helped a lot) at the time.
Symbolic debugging of the PDP-10 kernel was available, and by the mid '70's, I think, you could run scripts that made formatted dumps of data structures. They were tricky to set up and prone to fail when the data structures were buggy -- which was most likely when you most wanted to use the tool. Anyway, the place I worked used a PDP-15 as a network front-end for the PDP-10, and we wrote most of our own debugging tools for it.
Keep in mind, also, the limitations in available hardware and software at the time. A 1MB machine was a big system in the early '70's, and was expected to support 30 concurrant timesharing users! We didn't have Perl. ;-)
PDP-11's complicated matters, if I recall corectly; some PDP-11 data types were LE, but others were BE, or mixed endian.
Reading mixed integer/character data on a rax hex or octal dump is distinctly more pleasurable, faster, and accurate on a fully BE system. This has been my personal experience, and it is my opinion. Although I do not have a survey or citation to offer, I recall other programmers at the time concurring with this opinion.
I would assert (if I had the hard data to prove it), as a matter of historical experience, that BE systems were generally better for network programming in the '70s than LE systems were, all other factors being equal (of course, they never are).
</geezer-mode>
Craig Milo Rogers
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