Talk:Endianness/Archive 1

message: Lemuel Gulliver's the name of the character, isn't it (as opposed to Swift's pen name)?
:That's right; it's Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. Swift may have written the tale in first person form, though (IIRC, it's been like twenty years since I read it). --Wernher 23:48, 20 Mar 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Who was Gulliver? 

message: I changed the example 0xDEADBEEF since it might give readers the mistaken impression that hex digits are the same as letters and that texts are stored on computers as hex digits. AxelBoldt 16:42, 17 Mar 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I've changed it from 0xA0B70708 to 0x4A3B2C1D.  I think the pattern will help the reader to more quickly understand the essence of endianness. The letter hex digits march in one direction while the numeric hex digits march the other way.  The un-arbitrariness is a drawback, but smaller than the perception gain, I think. -R. S. Shaw 21:43, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I think 0x4A3B2C1D is brilliant.  --Doradus 03:22, 29 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hex string example 

message: Does endianness also affect the storing of texts? I.e., is the text 'ABCD' stored as ASCII 0x44434241 on little endian machines? AxelBoldt 16:49, 17 Mar 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Good points. It's very weird the article doesn't mention UTF-16 as if anything besides definitions were superficial. -- Taku 17:07, Mar 17, 2004 (UTC)
Ok, so if endianness does not affect the storing of ASCII text (1 byte=1 char), what exactly is the NUXI problem? I don't understand. AxelBoldt 13:19, 20 Mar 2004 (UTC)

text: I think it's just the term to describe the general problem. If you're storing two characters per 16 byte word, then the NUXI/UNIX distinction becomes a bit more vivid. Dysprosia 13:39, 20 Mar 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, but my question is: are the characters stored that way? I.e., will the memory of a big-endian machine storing the string 'UNIX' look different from the memory of a little-endian machine storing the same string? AxelBoldt 15:37, 20 Mar 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: From the Endian FAQ referenced in the External links section: "The same order also applies to long (multi-word) character strings and to multiple precision numbers." The NUXI problem appears when transferring data over a network where the computers on each end are "different-endian" from each other, and no precaution for this is made in the protocol. However, to acknowledge your doubt, I do not at the moment quite remember whether NUXI was to be understood as an example text string or as a fictional hex digit quadruple. I guess I have to study the endianness canon intensively all over again... --Wernher 23:48, 20 Mar 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Hmmm, I just checked the article again, and I think I got the stuff to compute correctly in my head now, like it sometimes used to do before: 1) ASCII text, i.e. strings of char bytes, and multibyte numbers, are the same to the computer as regards transfers over a link to another machine — just arrays of bytes, and 2) the specific example known as NUXI is just what happens when the string UNIX on a little-endian computer is sent to a middle-endian computer (substitute the individual letters for the bytes in the example, and you'll see). --Wernher 00:12, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)
replies: text:  With 2, I don't think so. I'm pretty sure endianness matters when you're considering storing a certain number of bytes per word (consider arbitrary length strings). Taku's site provides a good explanation. Dysprosia 01:08, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Er - aren't we actually saying the same thing here? Yes, the strings would be stored differently in memory because of the difference in endianness, and, also, this typically is most often ignored until one tries to send data from an x-endian to a y-endian computer (x and y being different endiannesses). --Wernher 01:37, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm saying that if you store an array, with each element consisting of one byte, endianness does not matter. However if each character is stored in an array of 16-bit or 32-bit elements, where each character is stored two characters per array element (so [UN] [IX]), then it does matter, since endianness refers to how each byte (each character) is stored in each 16 or 32 bit element. Strings are usually stored in arrays of 1 bytes, so sending a plain, ASCII string to a machine with different endianness wouldn't be mangled. Dysprosia 03:01, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)

text:  It all depends on how the programmer stores it. Usually, the char datatype in C, for example, is one byte long. In memory, I don't think it's different either, and that endianness only affects the storage of bytes per word... Dysprosia 23:53, 20 Mar 2004 (UTC)

text: The site you mention is a must for our article, as it's quite concise. I'll include under External links. --Wernher 02:03, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Endianness in text 

message: I'd change "Architectures that follow this rule are called big-endian and include Motorola 68000, SPARC and System/370." like this: "Architectures that follow this rule are called big-endian (for "big end first") and include Motorola 68000, SPARC and System/370." i.e. add the parentheses with an explanation.
I think this would make understanding the point even easier, although the example is already pretty clear.
However I don't want to create confusion with the real origin of the term which is explained in the Background section below.
Perhaps it should be placed somewhere else, or in a different wording, but I'd still like to stick the "big end first" somewhere.
Comments?
Krille 11:53, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Something like this sounds ok.  If it's good there, probably the corresponding phrase for little endian would also be good.  Be bold. -R. S. Shaw 18:39, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  Done. -Krille 19:19, 1 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Endianness in computers 

message: An anonymous user made some changes showing System/370, System/390 and z/OS as bi-endian.  (z/OS is an OS; probably meant zSeries.)  I'm not that knowledgeable about these, but I'm sure the 370 was pure big endian, so I've reverted the changes for now.  Googling this seems a bit hard, but did find this on an IBM site: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/eserver/articles/linux_s390/ which is "Linux for S/390 and zSeries porting hints" and says "zSeries is a big-endian system. Any code that processes byte-oriented data that originated on a little-endian system might need some byte swapping...." so it really does look like Anon's edits were off base. -R. S. Shaw 05:36, 28 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  IBM machines 

message: A spelling question: is "Big-endian" spelled with or without the hypen? The article has mostly with, but a few without, for example, in the "Portability Issues" section, we have:
  "... if the data are stored using big endian integers ..."
and in the "Discussion, background, etymology" section:
  " ... The spoken numeral system in English is big endian (with minor exceptions ..."
These are the only two such examples I find, the rest are more like:
  "... In a consistently big-endian architecture ..."
I suspect the hyphen should be required and the first two examples should be corrected. Yes?
:It should be "big-endian".  See hyphen. - Omegatron 13:54, July 19, 2005 (UTC)
:I just corrected those errors. Dan Granahan 14:00, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  An idiot spelling question 

message: *Morse code seems to be lil'-endian?
*Roman numerals are big-endian, like others... Vugluskr 14:17, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: How does Morse have an endianness? Dysprosia 03:32, 29 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Morse code, Roman numerals