From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,daa9673fcde700dc,start X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: "W. Wesley Groleau (Wes)" Subject: Lots of Endians Date: 1996/04/15 Message-ID: <9604152038.AA09874@most>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 147674980 sender: Ada programming language comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU mailer: Elm [revision: 70.85] newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-04-15T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: > ... 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) -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- W. Wesley Groleau (Wes) Office: 219-429-4923 Magnavox - Mail Stop 10-40 Home: 219-471-7206 Fort Wayne, IN 46808 elm (Unix): wwgrol@pseserv3.fw.hac.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------