Re: Linux/IA-64 byte order
Hans-Peter Jansen (hpj.lisa@t-online.de)
Wed, 10 Mar 1999 18:53:21 +0100
Peter A. Castro told us:
>
> Linus Torvalds said ...
> >
> > In article <36E5678C.380F3E33@t-online.de>,
> > Hans-Peter Jansen <hpj.lisa@t-online.de> wrote:
> > >>
> > >> The computing world would be better off with just one byte order, that
> > >> byte order isn't going to be BE.
> > >
> > >Take it easy, BE folks, LE is better, because i.e. error detection
> > >of network protocols, which are normally BE. If you coders forget to
> > >swap a single short, LE will easily show up (aka. won't work).
> >
> > I appreciate the sarcasm, but that isn't my point.
> >
> > My POINT is that there is absolutely no technical reason to prefer one
> > over the other.
>
> You should be looking for any good reason to choose one format over
> another, not just technical reasons. Networks were built by humans and
> debugged by humans. Quite frankly looking at raw network packets off of
> a wire is much easier to read if it's readable by humans (and, yes, this
> is exactly what I've done in the past). The machines don't know, nor do
> they care about the correct ordering of data. What's important is that
> when it breaks there needs to be an easy way for humans to diagnose the
> problem, and, quite frankly LE is *not* conducive to that process.
I think, it's time to lay down the weapons, this round is lost for the
BE folks. Let's hope and work for better opens source debugging tools on
every platform, which support us mortals getting around those LE/BE problems.
As a metter of fact, we all stick to some modern form of hinduism:
We cannot slaughter holy cows. This one's called compatibility.
It ain't 1992 any more! Time to open our minds towards the new millenium.
Growing cheerfully
Hans-Peter
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/