Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!apple!ames!pacbell!osc!jgk
From: jgk@osc.COM (Joe Keane)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Byte ordering
Summary: Either order is self-consistent.
Keywords: byte sex
Message-ID: <1991@osc.COM>
Date: 4 Feb 90 19:07:22 GMT
References: <9656@spool.cs.wisc.edu> <1990Feb2.215421.24894@utzoo.uucp>
Reply-To: jgk@osc.COM (Joe Keane)
Organization: Object Sciences Corp., Menlo Park, CA
Lines: 20

In article <1990Feb2.215421.24894@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
writes:

>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,

Isn't this also ``backward compatibility with previous mistakes''?  And what
about RS-232?

>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.

Sorry, but little-endian is just as consistent.  The code is exactly the same,
you just have to switch << and >> in the right places.  On say a MicroVAX, the
leftmost bit on the screen is the least significant in its byte, word, page,
or whatever.