From: "W. Wesley Groleau (Wes)" <wwgrol@PSESERV3.FW.HAC.COM>
Subject: Lots of Endians
Date: 1996/04/15
Date: 1996-04-15T00:00:00+00:00 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <9604152038.AA09874@most> (raw)
> ... not only ... the Endian problem, but also the "which bit is lsb ..."
Even without the bit numbering question, there are more options than
Big Endian/Little Endian.
If you have byte-level addressing, there are 24 ways to store 16#89ABCDEF#
Most of them are probably never used, but unless my memory fails, I once
was forced to cope with (order of increasing addresses).
AB 89 EF CD
or something like that. Not really a major issue for integers. What
made it a problem was in converting a floating point to IEEE-754 for
hand off to a 680x0/68882. I know this is a job for assembly, but
we did it in Ada anyway. It was rather irritating to have to separately
rep-spec two pieces of mantissa and reassemble them for output.
Then we discovered the disk IO swapped the bytes back, so we had to re-do
it the easy way after all!
(VAX/VMS if anyone cares)
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