[Haskell-cafe] Re: Endianess

[Aaron Denney]

On 2008-05-13, Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com> wrote:
> Aaron Denney wrote:
>> On 2008-05-12, Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com> wrote:
>>   
>>> (Stupid little-endian nonsense... mutter mutter...)
>>>     
>>
>> 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, as bit number n should
>> have value 2^n, byte number n should have value 256^n, and so forth.
>>
>> Yes, in human to human communication there is value in having the most
>> significant bit first.  Not really true for computer-to-computer
>> communication.
>>   
>
> It just annoys me that the number 0x12345678 has to be transmuted into 
> 0x78563412 just because Intel says so. Why make everything so complicated?
>
> [Oh GOD I hope I didn't just start a Holy War...]

On the other hand I appreciate that the consecutive memory locations
containing [1][0][0][0] are the number 1, no matter whether you're
reading a byte, a short, or an int.

-- 
Aaron Denney
-><-