At 02:58 18-02-2000 -0800, Markus Kuhn wrote:
>Littleendian is technological nonsense
Perhaps so. But it is a fact of life on the majority of computers in
existence. It may not be an ISO standard but, for better or worse, it is
the "industry standard". It seems silly to force the majority of computers
to convert to big-endian in order to communicate with each other, and then
convert it back.
Because such conversions take time, no matter how short, it would seem more
efficient to use the little-endian order for data communication because
then most computers would not have to waste cycles on conversion.
I don't know whether little-endian is technological nonsense (it has its
advantages and disadvantages), but I think using big-endian for
communications is pragmatic nonsense.
>cemented by the Wintel cartel.
Now, that is nonsense. The "Win" part of the cartel has nothing to do with
it. It happens to run on Intel processors because IBM chose an Intel
processor for its PC. And Intel has always made its new processors
backwards compatible with their predecessors. And thank goodness for that!
Cheers,
Adam
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:59 EDT