Charles Mills wrote: >One thing about little-endian I have observed of relevance to software >writers: if I expect you to pass me a halfword and instead you pass me a >fullword, then the code will probably work most of the time. Whether that is a >benefit or a liability depends upon one's point of view. I come down strongly on the “Liability” side: “It works until you enter a really big number” sounds like just asking for obscure failures. Obviously with big-endian, the opposite is also true: if I expect a fullword and you pass a halfword, it’ll sort of work with big numbers, fail with smaller. But that’s an easier to detect failure (“I passed 100000 and it said I passed 34 thousand and change”), plus testing will start with small values and thus it’ll show up immediately; the little-endian case will work fine until the numbers get big and it doesn’t.
But, like you, I grew up with big-endian, wasn’t even aware of little-endian until well into my career. Reading the Wikipedia page makes my head hurt: Some CPUs, such as many PowerPC processors intended for embedded use and almost all SPARC processors, allow per-page choice of endianness. Wow. That’s…fun. FSVO “fun”. …phsiii ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
