Yeah, I have to agree with "liability" except in the cases where valid values above 32K or 64K are impossible. (The length of a command entered on a single "punched card" for example.)
And no, @Gil, that is not your cue for a rant on long LRECL SYSIN datasets! <g> > allow per-page choice of endianness Sure, CPU silicon is so cheap and trivial now. Back when Intel did little-endian (despite surely being aware of the S/360 big-endian precedent) I suspect it was to save silicon: an 8-bit processor could do 32-bit arithmetic by nibbling off one byte of it at a time. Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Phil Smith Sent: Wednesday, March 8, 2017 8:42 AM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: curious: why S/360 & decendants are "big endian". 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 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
