[Haskell-cafe] Endianess

[Jed Brown]

On Tue 2008-05-13 20:46, Ketil Malde wrote:
> Aaron Denney <wnoise at ofb.net> writes:
> 
> 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

This, of course, is because `od -x' regards the input as 16-bit integers.  We
can get saner output if we regard it is 8-bit integers.

  $ od -t x1 foo
  0000000 66 6f 6f 62 61 72 0a
  0000007

> > Now I'm convinced that little endian is the way to go, as bit number n
> > should have value 2^n, byte number n should have value 256^n, and so forth.

It's not that simple with bits.  They lack consistency just like the usual US
date format and the way Germans read numbers.

Jed
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