From: Allan Schaffer (allan++at++sgi.com)
Date: 04/24/2000 13:24:02
Thank you Mario for the quite complete description of our ITEC
Friends of Performer meeting!
Now as promised (after a bit of web searching):
On Apr 12, 10:15pm, Mario Veraart wrote:
> Next speaker was Allan Shaffer about pfLinux.
[...]
> o Endianness
> (allan we still get the story of where the term endian comes from)
In Swift's fictional classic "Gulliver's Travels" the Lilliputians
debated quite hotly the controversy of, which end of a boiled egg
should be cracked when taking off the shell?
Members of the big-end-ian party felt it appropriate to crack the big
(round) end. Members of the little-end-ian party felt strongly one
should crack the little (pointy) end.
In 1980 Danny Cohen wrote a now famous paper called "On Holy Wars and
a Plea for Peace", {USC/ISI IEN 137} regarding byte ordering in
multibyte words -- and applied the term "Endian" to this problem.
The term immediately stuck.
The New Hacker's Dictionary describes the terms as follows:
big-endian adj. Describes a computer architecture in which, within a
given multi-byte numeric representation, the most significant byte
has the lowest address (the word is stored `big-end-first'). Most
processors, including the IBM 370 family, the PDP-10, the Motorola
microprocessor families, and most of the various RISC designs current
in mid-1993, are big-endian. [...]
little-endian adj. Describes a computer architecture in which, within
a given 16- or 32-bit word, bytes at lower addresses have lower
significance (the word is stored `little-end-first'). The PDP-11 and
VAX families of computers and Intel microprocessors and a lot of
communications and networking hardware are little-endian.
Allan
-- Allan Schaffer allan++at++sgi.com Silicon Graphics http://reality.sgi.com/allan
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