>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.
Firstly, I think its more apposite ask "why did Intel make the 80XX family little endian." when every thing before, around that time and what came after has been big endian? I believe that the answer is that these are essentially 8-bit architectures and process a byte at a time. I believe that the little endian architecture saves space in the Microcode, as 16-bit loads are merely the 8-bit loads continued. On a 32-bit word based machine, with word aligned operands, which is what the S/360 was it makes no sense whatsoever. >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 Dave Wade ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
