Byte order (retitled)

[Mark Biggar]

In article <7046 at cca.UUCP> g-rh at cca.UUCP (Richard Harter) writes:
>However we have a second constraint, that comparison be valid whether
>a word is considered as a character string or as a number.

Where in the world did this constraint come from.  This has to be one of
most blatant violations of the spirit of data abstraction and information
hiding I have ever seen.  You don't require this if the types being
considered are signed/unsigned or int/float, why should you if the types
are char-string/int.

Mark Biggar
{allegra,burdvax,cbosgd,hplabs,ihnp4,akgua,sdcsvax}!sdcrdcf!markb