Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!mcgill-vision!bloom-beacon!snorkelwacker!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ncar!ames!pasteur!homer.Berkeley.EDU!mcgrath From: mcgrath@homer.Berkeley.EDU (Roland McGrath) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Byte ordering Message-ID: Date: 6 Feb 90 23:31:47 GMT References: <9656@spool.cs.wisc.edu> <1990Feb2.215421.24894@utzoo.uucp> <1991@osc.COM> <1910@l.cc.purdue.edu> Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU Organization: Hackers Anonymous International, Ltd., Inc. (Applications welcome) Lines: 12 In-reply-to: cik@l.cc.purdue.edu's message of 6 Feb 90 12:38:20 GMT Obviously, for some purposes big-endian is better, and for some purposes little-endian is better. I suppose even twisted-endian (least-significant byte first in words, but most-significant word first in longwords) is good for something. I think the solution for the architects is to have it selectable. The Intel 860, the AMD 29000, and I'm sure others I don't know about, have this feature: a bit in the processor control register determines byte order. -- Roland McGrath Free Software Foundation, Inc. roland@ai.mit.edu, uunet!ai.mit.edu!roland