This is more a Friday type topic. But I'm curious about why the original designers of the S/360 went with "big endian" instead of "small endian"? The _only_ reason that I can think of is because our arithmetic "system" is "big endian". The more I think about it, the more Intel's "little endian" architecture makes more sense. I also wish the same were true of our writing (e.g. one hundred would be written 001, not 100). This latter would actually make outputting formatted numbers easier to program.
Oh, well, feel free to ignore this musing of mine. -- "Irrigation of the land with seawater desalinated by fusion power is ancient. It's called 'rain'." -- Michael McClary, in alt.fusion Maranatha! <>< John McKown ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
