such as
PDP-endian, or just the two common endiannesses?
^^^^^^^^^^
What does that term mean? ;->
Some (all? most?) PDP-11 setups were little-endian with respect to
(8-bit) bytes within a (16-bit) short, but big-endian with respect to
(16-bit) shorts within a (32-bit) long. For example, 0x87654321 would
come out as the four consecutive bytes 0x65 0x87 0x21 0x43. My
understanding of this phenomenon is minimal, but, for what it's worth,
I think this happened because bytes-within-short was done LE by the
hardware, but the PDP-11 does not have any 32-bit hardware data type,
so it has to be simulated by software (much the way 32-bit machines
these days do 64-bit integers), and whoever created that software
support did it BE, for whatever reason.
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