RE: Endian Mapping

[Richard Walter <rwalter@brocade.com>]

See http://www.rdrop.com/~cary/html/endian_faq.html & read the section
entitled "ON HOLY WARS AND A PLEA FOR PEACE." by Danny Cohen.

Note 1: This was the first page that hit at Google on a search for
"endianness holy wars".  I have no affiliation with David Cary & I'm sure
that this exists on numerous other places on the web.

Note 2: Note that the piece by Danny was written in 1980 (21 years ago!)
which predates PCI, i386, PowerPC, and just about all other busses in modern
PCs.

Note 3: My personal opinion on the main advantage of Big Endian is that when
doing a data dump of memory by byte addresses increasing from left to right,
multi-byte chunks show up in human readable form.  But either endianness is
self consistent and has no inherent advantage over the other.

-Richard Walter
Senior Hardware Engineer
Brocade Communications Systems
rwalter@brocade.com
Note: I speak for myself, not for Brocade Communications.


-----Original Message-----
From: Weng Tianxiang [mailto:WTX@umem.com]
Sent: Friday, June 22, 2001 3:57 PM
To: pci-sig@znyx.com
Subject: Re: Endian Mapping


Hi Richard,
The discussions about Big Ending and Little Ending are very funny. I would
like to ask a stupid question: