Xref: utzoo comp.arch:7800 comp.misc:4654 comp.lang.misc:2489 comp.protocols.misc:446
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From: d25001@mic.UUCP (Carrington Dixon)
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.misc,comp.lang.misc,comp.protocols.misc
Subject: Re: "big endian" and "little endian" - first usage for computer
Message-ID: <208@mic.UUCP>
Date: 10 Jan 89 00:02:28 GMT
References: <2766@cbnews.ATT.COM> <10147@well.UUCP> <13045@cup.portal.com> <205@mic.UUCP> <2702@rti.UUCP>
Reply-To: d25001@mic.UUCP (Carrington Dixon)
Organization: Micro Net
Lines: 43

In article <2702@rti.UUCP> bcw@rti.UUCP (Bruce Wright) writes:
>In article <205@mic.UUCP>, d25001@mic.UUCP (Carrington Dixon) writes:

>Well, you can assert that the FORTRAN language itself is an error;  this is
>essentially what you are saying.  The point is that there is NO WAY (repeat:
>NO WAY) in the Fortran 77 standard to declare a formal argument list.  That

     We both agree that there is no provision in FORTRAN to catch 
mismatched arguments at compile time.  We even seem to agree that this
is a failing of that language.  Thus there is a large category of errors
that FORTRAN cannot find at compile time.  I maintain that those who
wish to create "correct" programs will want to test these modules in
order to find as many errors as possible before dumping the mess on some
hapless user.

     With this in mind, I maintain that some data formats lend themselves
to finding such latent errors more readily than do others and that it
would be pernicious of any vendor to choose its data formats with an
eye to making such checkout as difficult as possible.  DEC and little-
endian integers was just the example at hand; I can think of other
architectures that allow the equally unfortunate passing of double-reals
and receiving single-reals with similar problems in runtime diagnoses.

>In other words, if you want to flame anything about safe computing, you
>should probably be flaming FORTRAN, not DEC or the VAX or me.
>
>						Bruce C. Wright

    I thought my response was a little mild to qualify as a full-
fledged usenet flame, but I suppose that opinons may differ.
For the record, I do not think that DEC was guilty of guilty of choosing
its data formats in some blind and misguided attempt to follow FORTRAN's
lead into the dismal swamp.  They chose the "little-endian" format for
other reasons.  I am sure that they were under no delusion that they had
to perpeptuate FORTRAN's shortcomings in their hardware.

     Incidentally, I think that the phrase that you were trying to use
(twice) was "in error."  I might be offended if I thought that you
really meant that I was "an error."


Carrington Dixon
UUCP: { convex, killer }!mic!d25001