🚀 go-pugleaf

uri@orcisi.UUCP writes:

>My point is that the Least-Significant-Byte-first camp (LSBians,
>pronounced: elesbians) has a more correct way than the Most-Significant-byte-
>first (MSBians, pronounced: emesbians), and I am going to try to convince
>the MSBians to go my way. 

It seems to me that the basic premise of the argument that follows the above
statement is that the name (memory address) bound to a long word in memory
is different from the name bound to its least significant byte, whereas
the same name (register number) references a longword (for a
long register operand) or its least significant byte (for a byte operand).
The poster argues that this is inconsistent.

In fact, the problem (and the cause of the whole debate, I often think) is that
separate bytes in a longword in memory have different names bound to them
at all.  What is the 2nd byte of a 4-byte integer good for, on its own?
Why should it be separately addressable at all?  

In the 68000, registers, however transiently, have a type associated with
them that determines their length; but the individual bytes of a register,
when it's a longword register, do not have separate names.
Register 5 is register 5, though its size varies depending on its type
(which persists only for the duration of 1 instruction).  Most problems
arise when you take a datum of one type and suddenly start treating it
as a different type; that is the real inconsistency.