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

H. Peter Anvin (hpa@transmeta.com)
23 Oct 1998 23:10:08 GMT


I presume this referred to ASCII printed form, where I agree bigendian
is the appropriate (because that's the way people are used to reading
numbers.)

For internal representation there are actually substantial technical
advantages with littleendian notation, despite the fact that it
appears politically incorrect to say so...

-hpa

Followup to: <Pine.LNX.3.96.981023151556.431A-100000@penguin.transmeta.com>
By author: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>
> On Fri, 23 Oct 1998, Perry Harrington wrote:
> >
> > Not to keep beating a dead horse, but I'd like to solidify the standing
> > of endianess in numbers in /proc. I've already proposed creating generic
> > formatting routines for /proc info, and I think that the output should be
> > big endian for Hex, Binary, and Decimal, as it's significantly easier
> > to read and parse.
>
> I really don't want big endian. I'm used to little endian, and I think
> it's fundamentally wrong to prefer one over the other. So if anything is
> confusing now, it's not getting better by changing the byte order. It
> should just be printed out in a format where byte order doesn't matter.
>
> Linus

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