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Article #22153Re: Byte ordering
From: Henry Spencer
Date: Mon, 05 Feb 1990 19:29
Date: Mon, 05 Feb 1990 19:29
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In article <1991@osc.COM> jgk@osc.COM (Joe Keane) writes: >>... 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? It's a compatibility issue, yes, but it's compatibility with a widespread standard rather than just with your predecessors' mistakes. I don't see the relevance of RS232. Nothing except the UART chips ever cares about the bit order on the wire; all the computers involved deal with the data a byte/character at a time. It's the same way on Ethernet: the bytes are transmitted a bit at a time, but almost nobody knows or cares which bit order is used. -- SVR4: every feature you ever | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology wanted, and plenty you didn't.| 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: <1990Feb5.192958.12091@utzoo.uucp> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology References: <9656@spool.cs.wisc.edu> <1990Feb2.215421.24894@utzoo.uucp> <1991@osc.COM> Date: Mon, 5 Feb 90 19:29:58 GMT