On Thursday, April 11, 2002, at 07:38 PM, George W Gerrity wrote:
> "Considering the difficulty af actually getting access to a file in such
> a manner that the 'endian-ness' of the computer architecture is NOT
> transparent, why do we even need a byte-order mark?"
>
Actually, this isn't at all difficult. Macs read, for example, both PC
and Mac formatted devices such as floppies (remember them?) and Zip disks.
As it happens, the last bunch of floppies we bought at my house were
preformatted for PC's, and being lazy we haven't reformatted them when we
use them for Macs. A pure file on such a disk could easily be a PC file
created by a Windows app or a Mac file created by a Mac app. There's no
way of telling based on the media itself from which architecture the file
came.
==========
John H. Jenkins
jenkins@apple.com
jenkins@mac.com
http://homepage.mac.com/jenkins/
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