Article View: comp.arch
Article #22109Re: Byte ordering
From: Henry Spencer
Date: Fri, 02 Feb 1990 21:54
Date: Fri, 02 Feb 1990 21:54
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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
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Newsgroups: comp.arch Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!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