TGIF. With due respect to the view that Indian (Hindi? Sanskrit?) via Arabic numerals were the progenitor of our modern big-endian bias, I'd like to point out that Roman numerals--remember them you old dudes?--are apparently big-endian. Lord knows who invented that convoluted system, but it persisted in academia and in commerce for centuries.
Friday off topic. I read somewhere that at the time of American independence circa 1776, it was de rigueur for an educated person to be able to do *arithmetic* in Roman numerals. You could not otherwise claim to be properly schooled. A footnote on the whimsy of stodgy education standards. . . J.O.Skip Robinson Southern California Edison Company Electric Dragon Team Paddler SHARE MVS Program Co-Manager 323-715-0595 Mobile 626-543-6132 Office ⇐=== NEW [email protected] -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Paul Gilmartin Sent: Friday, June 16, 2017 10:56 AM To: [email protected] Subject: (External):Re: RFE? xlc compile option for C integers to be "Intel compat" or Little-Endian On Fri, 16 Jun 2017 16:43:38 +0100, David W Noon wrote: >... >This is not the way computers do arithmetic. Adding, subtracting, etc., >are performed in register-sized chunks (except packed decimal) and the >valid sizes of those registers is determined by architecture. > I suspect programmed decimal arithmetic was a major motivation for little-endian. >In fact, on little-endian systems the numbers are put into big-endian >order when loaded into a register. Consequently, these machines do >arithmetic in big-endian. > Ummm... really? I believe IBM computers number bits in a register with 0 being the most significant bit; non-IBM computers with 0 being the least sighificant bit. I'd call that a bitwise little-endian. And it gives an easy summation formula for conversion to unsigned integers. >As someone who was programming DEC PDP-11s more than 40 years ago, I >can assure everybody that little-endian sucks. > But do the computers care? (And which was your first system? Did you feel profound relief when you discovered the alternative convention?) IIRC, PDP-11 provided for writing tapes little-endian, which was wrong for sharing numeric data with IBM systems, or big-endian, which was wrong for sharing text data. For those who remain unaware on a Friday: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilliput_and_Blefuscu#History_and_politics -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
