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From: crowl@rochester.ARPA (Lawrence Crowl)
Newsgroups: net.lang.c
Subject: Re: Byte order (or you are both wrong)
Message-ID: <17420@rochester.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 21-Apr-86 08:32:12 EST
Article-I.D.: rocheste.17420
Posted: Mon Apr 21 08:32:12 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 24-Apr-86 05:27:33 EST
References: <7046@cca.UUCP> <6578@utzoo.UUCP> <17162@rochester.ARPA> <2568@utcsri.UUCP>
Reply-To: crowl@rochester.UUCP (Lawrence Crowl)
Organization: U of Rochester, CS Dept, Rochester, NY
Lines: 34

In article <2568@utcsri.UUCP> greg@utcsri.UUCP (Gregory Smith) writes:
>In article <17162@rochester.ARPA> crowl@rochester.UUCP (Lawrence Crowl) writes:
>>CHALLENGE:  Come up with a scheme for representing numbers, and a sorting
>>scheme in which numbers sort naturally.  Your scheme must deal with variable
>>length character strings and variable size numbers.  That is, you cannot
>>requires strings to be padded with nulls, or numbers to be padded with zeros.
>How about prepending the digit count to big-endian digit strings?
>so 32 and 126 become 232 and 3126, and a lexical comparison gives
>3126 > 232. Of course, leading zeroes in the significand cannot be used. ...
The problem with this scheme is that it assumes a constant size "length" field.
This is the best that I have yet seen though.
 
>>Note that many part numbering schemes have intermixed letters and digits.
>But what significance do letters have? do you want them to be ignored,
>or to be assigned a dictionary order with the numbers?
This is part of the problem!

>P.S. this rather obscure scenario hardly seems reason to state that
>little- and big-endians are both wrong.

Sort the following list of "words": 302, 3B2, -42, 132, 26, AD, ab, 74LS00

--The damn poster program wants more lines.
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Lawrence Crowl             716-275-5766        University of Rochester
                                               Computer Science Department
...!{allegra,decvax,seismo}!rochester!crowl    Rochester, New York,  14627