[Haskell-cafe] Endianess

Ketil Malde ketil at malde.org
Tue May 13 14:46:58 EDT 2008


Aaron Denney <wnoise at ofb.net> writes:

> I used to be a big-endian advocate, on the principle that it doesn't
> really matter, and it was standard network byte order.  Now I'm
> convinced that little endian is the way to go

I guess it depends a lot on what you grew up with.  The names
(little/big endian) are incredibly apt.

The only argument I can come up with, is that big endian seems to make
more sense for 'od':

  % echo foobar > foo 
  % od -x foo
  0000000 6f66 626f 7261 000a
  0000007

Since this is little endian, the output corresponds to "of bo ra
\0\n".

So I guess the argument is that for big-endian, the concatenation of
hex numbers is invariant with respect to word sizes?

-k
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants


More information about the Haskell-Cafe mailing list