Re: Endian and Ada

["Theodore E. Dennison" <dennison@escmail.orl.mmc.com>]

Michael Anthony Porcelli wrote:
> 
> I'm taking a computer architecture class and my eyes have been opened to the
> incredible lack of progress that computer science has made in the area of
> architecture-independant programming.  One of the main problems that my
> professor likes to point out the endian problem and the fact that so much
> software is *not* endian-independant (due mainly to the widespread use of C
> and C++).  However, he is not familiar enough with Ada (nor am I) to know if
> Ada is endian-independant.  ...

It is not.

> writing).  I was wondering, however, if the day-to-day Ada software out
> there is written endian-independant (i.e. the language facilities used in
> most day-to-day programming don't depend on whether your architecture is
> "big" endian or "little" endian.)

In my experience, the answer is no. Typically the last application written
"loses" and has to swap bytes, unless a endian-aware communications protocol
(such as ASN.1) is used.

-- 
T.E.D.          
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