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Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] san rr com> wrote:
>> I've found it's worth the effort, at least when talking to other technical
>> people, to be precise and consistent about such things. :-)
>
> At least "big-endian" and "little-endian" are unambiguous in that
> everybody uses them with the same meaning, even though the names are
> completely backwards compared to what they mean (probably causing
> confusion to people learning them for the first time).
Yeah. It's the same basic problem, tho. We write the small numbers first,
and larger addresses come later on the screen.
I saw someone once arguing that a hex dump should be like this:
..... F E C D B A 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 | 0123456789ABCDEF
0100: 0A 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 40 20 20 20 20 20| @IHGFEDCBA\r
0110: ...
0120:
0130:
So, basically, the numbers are addressed right to left, while the text is
addressed left to right. Then little-endian is just as readable as
big-endian. While making bit zero be the LSB[1] of a byte or a register at
least has some mathematical backing, the endian-ness never seemed to really
make much difference as long as it was treated consistently, in my experience.
[1] And bit zero was the MSB on the mainframe I worked with. And, honestly,
I don't remember the endian-ness of it, because it never came up, because
the address pointing to a character was a different size than the address
pointing to a word or a double-word or whatever. If I had to guess, I'd
guess it was big-endian, but I'd have to look it up to be sure.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
C# - a language whose greatest drawback
is that its best implementation comes
from a company that doesn't hate Microsoft.
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