Byte order (retitled)

[David DiGiacomo]

In article <7046 at cca.UUCP> g-rh at cca.UUCP (Richard Harter) writes:
>	Well, no, little-endian came about because the engineers at DEC
>who designed the PDP-11 made an arbitrary decision that was not well
>thought out.  I will not essay to defend the sanity of DEC engineers,
>and cannot recommend that any one else do so (:-)).  It was a bad
>decision.

You are not considering the context of the decision.  A little-endian
architecture is highly desirable in an environment which uses
call-by-reference exclusively (e.g. PDP-11 Fortran).  It allows any size
value to be passed to a subroutine expecting a parameter of that size or
smaller.  In a predominantly call-by-value environment (e.g. C) this is
not particularly important, but there are plenty of programmers who have
been burned by { int c = 0; read(fd, &c, 1); }.

-- 
David DiGiacomo  {decvax, ihnp4, ucbvax}!sun!david  david at sun.com
Sun Microsystems, Mt. View, CA  (415) 960-7495