RE: Translated IUC10 Web pages: Experimental Results

From: Tony Harminc (tzha0@juts.ccc.amdahl.com)
Date: Fri Feb 07 1997 - 12:36:37 EST


On 6 Feb 97 at 17:21, Murray Sargent <murrays@microsoft.com> wrote:

> I believe the default for UCS2 is big endian, which is amusing since 95%
> of the world's computers are little endian. Evidently the majority
> doesn't always rule. Does someone know where The Unicode Standard
> defines UCS2 to be big endian?

Perhaps 95% of the CPUs (being Intel) are little endian, but I'll bet
that a large majority of the MIPS consumed doing useful work are
executed on big endian processors. (This is not bashing little
endianism or anything else; I simply mean that most Intel CPUs spend
almost all their lives sitting quietly on a desktop doing nothing.)

> Windows NT has a lot of code that assumes little endian order. I don't
> think there are any big-endian builds of NT.

I don't believe IBM has ever produced a little endian machine (except
those 686 etc. Intel clone chips). So I imagine the PowerPC is big
endian, and NT does run on that.

Tony Harminc
tzha0@juts.ccc.amdahl.com



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