Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!decwrl!Angelo!lindy!news
From: GQ.RLG@forsythe.stanford.edu (Dick Guertin)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: 'big endian' and 'little endian' - first usage for computer
Message-ID: <1897@lindy.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 2 Feb 89 16:32:05 GMT
Sender: news@lindy.Stanford.EDU
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In article <2951@ficc.uu.net>,
peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
>[deleted discussion about using sign bit on binary data for search
> keys to distinguish them from strings in a bigendian database]
>
>You can't assume all characters in the character set are positive.
>EBCDIC and ISO latin 1 violate this assumption.

Search algorithms typically work with "unsigned char"
where there are no positive or negative characters.