Byte order (or you are both wrong)

[Lawrence Crowl]

In article <2568 at utcsri.UUCP> greg at utcsri.UUCP (Gregory Smith) writes:
>In article <17162 at rochester.ARPA> crowl at rochester.UUCP (Lawrence Crowl) writes:
>>CHALLENGE:  Come up with a scheme for representing numbers, and a sorting
>>scheme in which numbers sort naturally.  Your scheme must deal with variable
>>length character strings and variable size numbers.  That is, you cannot
>>requires strings to be padded with nulls, or numbers to be padded with zeros.
>How about prepending the digit count to big-endian digit strings?
>so 32 and 126 become 232 and 3126, and a lexical comparison gives
>3126 > 232. Of course, leading zeroes in the significand cannot be used. ...
The problem with this scheme is that it assumes a constant size "length" field.
This is the best that I have yet seen though.
 
>>Note that many part numbering schemes have intermixed letters and digits.
>But what significance do letters have? do you want them to be ignored,
>or to be assigned a dictionary order with the numbers?
This is part of the problem!

>P.S. this rather obscure scenario hardly seems reason to state that
>little- and big-endians are both wrong.

Sort the following list of "words": 302, 3B2, -42, 132, 26, AD, ab, 74LS00

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Lawrence Crowl             716-275-5766        University of Rochester
                                               Computer Science Department
...!{allegra,decvax,seismo}!rochester!crowl    Rochester, New York,  14627