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From: glen herrmannsfeldt <g...@ugcs.caltech.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.os.vms
Subject: Re: Now for something On Topic
Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2012 20:30:27 +0000 (UTC)
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Johnny Billquist <b...@softjar.se> wrote:

(snip)

> And apart from IBM, all those started making CPUs after DEC, not before...

> And there are good arguments for both little endian and big endian. 
> People who tries to deny that just haven't though enough about it.

There are such arguments, but the little endian ones go away pretty
soon after the 6502. The 6502 is an interesting processor, especially
look at the subroutine call/return instructions. If you think it
pushes the return address on the stack, like most other processors,
then you should read it again. Maybe even for the 8080, but past
that you might as well go big-endian.

> All hail the PDP-11. Middle endian is the way to go! :-)

Yes, middle endian is fun. I remember Z constants initializing
floating point values in VAX Fortran many years ago.
(Not quite in the middle for double precision, though.)

-- glen