Talk about your programs in progress. Discuss how to implement features, etc.
Forum rules
This section is for testing Commander X16 programs and programs related to the CX16 for other platforms (compilers, data conversion tools, etc.)
Feel free to post works in progress, test builds, prototypes, and tech demos.
Finished works go in the Downloads category. Don't forget to add a hashtag (#) and the version number your program was meant to run on. (ie: #R41).
Just makes me wanna slap the guy who deliberately came up with these terms. I mean, the obvious interpretation is that the big one would be at the end for big endian.
It's like the guy who decided "flammable" and "inflammable" should mean the same thing. English. What a language.
It's from Gulliver's Travels. The two Lilliputian factions at war were the big endians and the little endians. The dispute was over which end of a soft-boiled egg was the correct one to crack into.
Thus a little endian starts at the little end, and a big endian starts at the big end.
That's how the terminology works for byte order. You start eating at the big or little end of the value.
... Thus a little endian starts at the little end, and a big endian starts at the big end. ...
... and the 6502's architecture of zero page addressing AND only having byte ADC and SBC arithmetic with "set up the carry bit, then start operating at the first byte and go as far as you want to go" makes starting at the little end a fairly natural choice.
But if you don't realize that the 6502 is little endian, then "<" and ">" as "pointing to" the low or high byte respectively doesn't make sense.
... and the 6502's architecture of zero page addressing AND only having byte ADC and SBC arithmetic with "set up the carry bit, then start operating at the first byte and go as far as you want to go" makes starting at the little end a fairly natural choice.
But if you don't realize that the 6502 is little endian, then "<" and ">" as "pointing to" the low or high byte respectively doesn't make sense.
My problem is with Jonathan Swift, who probably coined the term "inflammable" too.
I'm little endian to the bone. Always have been. Those blasphemers can't change my mind!
When I did online game dev in the 90's, I was aware that SOME servers (Designed by heretics, no doubt.) were big endian. And, as an insult to my faith, "Network order" was big endian. But I soldiered on, being sure to correct the order of bytes transmitted to big endian, and bytes received to little endian for the x86 processors all our clients programs used.
But my boss refused to do that. I warned him! There are monsters in the void, I told him! And they're big endian! We must be ever vigilant and precise.
Then we switched to SPARC servers. And all hell was released, as the big endian, little endian chasm rent the communication streams asunder. Except for me. My stuff worked great.
The moral of the story? It doesn't matter if you're right or wrong. When chaos comes, you had best be prepared.
