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BTW, I still have PTSD from EBCDIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC and big and little Endian https://en.wikipedia.org/
by r2sk5t 5y ago
BTW, I still have PTSD from EBCDIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC and big and little Endian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness
- anyfoo 5y agoSorry for making it worse, but big/little Endian is nowhere near past us: While most architectures are running little endian now, network byte order (used in IP, UDP, TCP, DNS, etc.) is still big endian. Lots of conversion ensues, so htonl(3) and similar standard library calls are very much alive. EBCDIC you'll only encounter in the mainframe and midrange world, and it's indeed sobering to realize that its encoding makes perfect sense on punchcards, but none whatsoever on any more modern medium.
- addaon 5y agoARM, POWER, and several other architectures still exist in big-endian, little-endian, and boot-selectable-endian versions; and some otherwise wonderful ARM chips (looking at you TI Hercules!) are big-endian only.
- anyfoo 5y agoFor any that are selectable, I was careful to say running little endian. :) You are right that big endian still exists, I just wanted to express that a significant part of the world is little endian now.
- addaon 5y agoAgreed. I just wish that the TMS570 family supported little endian. Sigh.