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From: david@sun.uucp (David DiGiacomo)
Newsgroups: net.lang.c
Subject: Re: Byte order (retitled)
Message-ID: <3462@sun.uucp>
Date: Mon, 7-Apr-86 14:58:58 EST
Article-I.D.: sun.3462
Posted: Mon Apr  7 14:58:58 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 9-Apr-86 23:43:18 EST
References: <7046@cca.UUCP>
Reply-To: david@sun.uUCp (David DiGiacomo)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Lines: 18

In article <7046@cca.UUCP> g-rh@cca.UUCP (Richard Harter) writes:
>	Well, no, little-endian came about because the engineers at DEC
>who designed the PDP-11 made an arbitrary decision that was not well
>thought out.  I will not essay to defend the sanity of DEC engineers,
>and cannot recommend that any one else do so (:-)).  It was a bad
>decision.

You are not considering the context of the decision.  A little-endian
architecture is highly desirable in an environment which uses
call-by-reference exclusively (e.g. PDP-11 Fortran).  It allows any size
value to be passed to a subroutine expecting a parameter of that size or
smaller.  In a predominantly call-by-value environment (e.g. C) this is
not particularly important, but there are plenty of programmers who have
been burned by { int c = 0; read(fd, &c, 1); }.

-- 
David DiGiacomo  {decvax, ihnp4, ucbvax}!sun!david  david@sun.com
Sun Microsystems, Mt. View, CA  (415) 960-7495