Touché and touché. But 29 is XIX and 190 is CXC. Talk about confused endian. No wonder the Roman Empire collapsed. Reports of Attila the Hun's onslaught were misreported over and over again. ;-(
. . 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 Clark Morris Sent: Friday, June 16, 2017 7:25 PM To: [email protected] Subject: (External):Re: RFE? xlc compile option for C integers to be "Intel compat" or Little-Endian [Default] On 16 Jun 2017 11:18:42 -0700, in bit.listserv.ibm-main [email protected] (Jesse 1 Robinson) wrote: >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. As I recall 9 is IX not VIIII and 90 is XC not LXXXX. Is anyone energetic enough to verify this. I am not tonight. Clark Morris > >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_politic >s > >-- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
