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| Endianness - Fun Stuff and Pitfalls | page 1 2
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Wojtek P
Poland
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Posts 1597
15 Jan 2011 13:42
| Thomas Hirsch wrote:
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OK, as you can see, I have moved this thread into the talk section. The endianess question is really a big problem. But a pure philosophical one which is discussed in theoretical informatics since the computer technology left 8 bit - and might never be solved.
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while i started and mostly used x86 architecture, from the beginning i considered little endian as strange and counterintuitive.
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Megol .
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Posts 690
15 Jan 2011 16:06
| Wojtek P wrote:
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Thomas Hirsch wrote:
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OK, as you can see, I have moved this thread into the talk section. The endianess question is really a big problem. But a pure philosophical one which is discussed in theoretical informatics since the computer technology left 8 bit - and might never be solved.
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while i started and mostly used x86 architecture, from the beginning i considered little endian as strange and counterintuitive.
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There's no right or wrong endian, both big and little endian have some quirks in some situations and some benefits in other.
Most people thinks that the first processor they learned have the right endian but I, like you are an exception to that rule :)
(Little endian rulez!!! :p)
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Loïc Dupuy
France
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Posts 253
17 Jan 2011 16:07
| The wikipedia page does a good job to explain endianess and the advantages of little endian.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Optimization- Little endian (easier for hardware)
Hardware conception is easier, and word length extension (going from 32 to 64 bits, just place the extra 32 bits next to the first one).
- Big endian (easier for human)
Seems more natural to read for left to right writers. So assmebly/device programming is easier in BigEndian, but no one cares anymore with high level languages (i would scratch my head to implement TCP bigendian protocol on an x86, but they are plenty of networking libs now).
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Joe M
Norway
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Posts 500
17 Jan 2011 17:11
| Loïc Dupuy wrote:
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... but no one cares anymore with high level languages...
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What? How can you be so sure? I really hope the Natami will increase peoples interest for assembly and C programming again.
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Loïc Dupuy
France
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Posts 253
17 Jan 2011 17:40
| The point is to use strength of each language in the same application. Assembly/C are very useful in low level implementation of repetitive or time critic task with limited border effects (graphics, high speed music mixing, memory copy, ...)
But for orchestration, menus, preferences,... better use an high level language.
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Cesare Di Mauro
Italy
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Posts 528
18 Jan 2011 05:26
| Loïc Dupuy wrote:
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The wikipedia page does a good job to explain endianess and the advantages of little endian.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Optimization
- Little endian (easier for hardware)
Hardware conception is easier, and word length extension (going from 32 to 64 bits, just place the extra 32 bits next to the first one).
- Big endian (easier for human)
Seems more natural to read for left to right writers.
So assmebly/device programming is easier in BigEndian, |
It depends on the kind of work to do.Think about multiprecision integer operations, for example.
| but no one cares anymore with high level languages |
A mess happens if you don't care about endianess reading/writing data "structs" on different platforms. ;)
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