Re: ARMS WAVING!!! Proposal to fix /proc dainbrammage.

H. Peter Anvin (hpa@transmeta.com)
23 Oct 1998 23:25:20 GMT

Followup to: <Pine.LNX.3.96.981023153951.431B-100000@penguin.transmeta.com>
By author: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>
> And I'm arguing that when it has structure, we should show the
> _structure_, not the bytes. And when you do that, "byteorder" goes away as
> a problem, because now you see the structure and the ordering is a purely
> structural one rather than some "what order do I deposit bytes in memory
> in?" problem.
>
> See? There are no byte order problems with "123.456" - everybody agrees
> that it is a floating point number somewhere between the integers 123 and
> 124. And that's regardless of how they represent the actual bits in
> memory.
>
> Linus
>

That's bigendian (the high-order digit comes first, or to the left,
because Latin-script text is L->R.) That happens to be pretty much
the only reason why some computers unfortunately use the same ordering
in memory.

I fully agree that it would be utterly idiotic to break numbers down
in their consistent bytes for display.

-hpa

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