Messages in this thread | | | From | (H. Peter Anvin) | Subject | Re: Linux/IA-64 byte order | Date | 9 Mar 1999 06:41:35 GMT |
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Followup to: <99030821525701.00877@taral.dobiecenter.com> By author: Taral <taral@cyberjunkie.com> In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel > > On Mon, 08 Mar 1999, Richard Gooch wrote: > >I'd like to start a discussion and see if we can reach some reasonable > >consensus on whether big-endian is acceptable to the community. I > >think this is an important issue, as a little-endian Linux/IA-64 is > >going to make it a second choice for a significant number of > >people. This reason for this follows (from my orginal message to > >David): > > To tell you the truth, big-endian is generally preferred in many systems, due > to the fact that groupings don't change the ordering of bytes. In other words: > > 12 34 56 78 9A BC DE F0 > 1234 5678 9ABC DEF0 > 12345678 9ABCDEF0 > > Are all the same data, just shown as bytes/shorts/longs, respectively. This > makes viewing data *much* easier, since you're not constantly byte-swapping.
BOGON ALERT! This is a human presentation, i.e. an I/O, issue. Personally I consider that once you start digging, littleendian is actually a superior format, making casting of integer pointers for the most part a noop, and generally having a multiplier that is dependent only on position. For bigendian to make sense, integer pointers should point to the *end* of an integer (humans want their numbers right-adjusted too!), not the beginning.
I see bigendianism as a very unfortunate historical accident, probably caused by the importation of a number system from a region with a right-to-left script into another region with a left-to-right script many hundreds of years ago.
-hpa -- "Linux is a very complete and sophisticated operating system. There are, and will be, large numbers of applications available for it." -- Paul Maritz, Group Vice President for Platforms And Applications, Microsoft Corporation [Reference at: http://www.kernel.org/~hpa/ms.html]
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