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From: kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen)
Subject: Re: Endian and Ada
Date: 1996/04/11
Message-ID: <1996Apr11.193521.1@eisner>#1/1
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references: <4kamb9$om2@flute.aix.calpoly.edu>
 <4kevdl$254a@flute.aix.calpoly.edu>
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organization: LJK Software
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-04-11T00:00:00+00:00
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In article <4kevdl$254a@flute.aix.calpoly.edu>, mporcell@flute.aix.calpoly.edu (Michael Anthony Porcelli) writes:

> 7.  Processors that switch from big to little.  I've only heard of these and
> I don't know if they are actually out on the market yet.  I do believe that
> HP (and others) are working on making architectures that can run in either
> big or little endian mode.

The Alpha AXP 21064 processor introduced by DEC in 1992 is reasonably
endian-neutral since it leaves byte manipulation to the compilers.
A typical instruction sequence might be slightly biased toward being
little-endian due to an extra instruction being used for computing
offsets, but it is a close match.

It happens that DEC's compilers are little-endian, but the one you
write could be big-endian.

Larry Kilgallen
LJK Software