>> Little-endian!!! > Middle-endian FTW!!!! That makes me wonder: was there any hardware that used an endianness such that conversion didn't loop with period 2?
Little- and big-endian do this; conversion between them is byteswapping, which is self-inverse. Conversion between PDP11-endian (0x87654321 stored as 0x65 0x87 0x21 0x43) and either big- or little-endian is also self-inverse. Is there any hardware for which conversion between its native storage format and any of these three is not self-inverse? To put it another way, and rather more loosely, is there one for which htonl and ntohl are actually different operations? /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B