The little- vs big-endian difference/controversy has always struck me as an unfortunate instance of specifically American monoglot provincialism.
The notion that the practice of writing things from left to right reflects sovereign virtue and its corollary, that those who use another convention are lesser species within the swarm, were never viable ones. Any convention will be wrong some of the time. One thus needs instructions for reversing strings in storage and for right-to-left 'searches', INDEX and the like, too. z/Architecture machines and others too now make them available, but they were too long coming. I had the dubious pleasure of devising mainframe Persian-language human interfaces in the 1970s; and, while possible, doing so was made gratuitously complicated [in a fashion that was without much intellectual interest] by the provincial mainframe architectures of the time. --jg ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
