5 Dec
2016
5 Dec
'16
9:17 a.m.
On 12/05/2016 08:51 AM, Mouse wrote:
Little- and big-endian do this; conversion between them is
byteswapping, which is self-inverse. Conversion between
PDP11-endian (0x87654321 stored as 0x65 0x87 0x21 0x43) and either
big- or little-endian is also self-inverse. Is there any hardware
for which conversion between its native storage format and any of
these three is not self-inverse? To put it another way, and rather
more loosely, is there one for which htonl and ntohl are actually
different operations?
Decimal machines, such as the 1620 and 1401? Of course, these aren't
word-oriented machines either, but variable-length systems. Conversion
between either of those and your VAX is not simply a matter of
byte-swapping.
Or how about architectures not using a word length that's an integral
number of bytes?
--Chuck