Newsgroups: comp.arch
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Byte ordering
Message-ID: <1990Feb2.215421.24894@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <9656@spool.cs.wisc.edu>
Date: Fri, 2 Feb 90 21:54:21 GMT

In article <9656@spool.cs.wisc.edu> rbi@beaufort.cs.wisc.edu (Bruce Irvin) writes:
>  Could someone send me (or post) a brief summary of the 
>major issues in choosing Big or Little Endian byte ordering 
>for an architecture?

My impression is that the big issue is usually backward compatibility
with previous mistakes.  As far as *technical* issues, the only ones
I'm aware of weakly favor big-endian:  it's the network standard order,
which makes life easier for protocol code, and it makes for consistent
bit ordering in things like frame buffers (do the dots on the screen
run left-to-right in successive bytes, or successive words? -- on a
little-endian machine, they're not the same), which simplifies the
code for optimized raster operations.
-- 
1972: Saturn V #15 flight-ready|     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
1990: birds nesting in engines | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu