With all due respect, Linus, you've left the role of "arbitor
of good taste" and entered into historical revisionism. I shall address
the "never has been" portion of your assertation.
<geezer-mode>
I was (among other things) an ARPANet (later Internet)
protocol programmer in the '70s and '80s. I used both LE and BE
systems. Raw hex dumps (or octal dumps due to my TOPS-10 training)
were the primary mode of debugging kernel data and networks (scoping
the 1822 or RS-232C interface also helped a lot) at the time.
Symbolic debugging of the PDP-10 kernel was available, and by
the mid '70's, I think, you could run scripts that made formatted
dumps of data structures. They were tricky to set up and prone to
fail when the data structures were buggy -- which was most likely when
you most wanted to use the tool. Anyway, the place I worked used a
PDP-15 as a network front-end for the PDP-10, and we wrote most of our
own debugging tools for it.
Keep in mind, also, the limitations in available hardware and
software at the time. A 1MB machine was a big system in the early
'70's, and was expected to support 30 concurrant timesharing users!
We didn't have Perl. ;-)
PDP-11's complicated matters, if I recall corectly; some
PDP-11 data types were LE, but others were BE, or mixed endian.
Reading mixed integer/character data on a rax hex or octal
dump is distinctly more pleasurable, faster, and accurate on a fully
BE system. This has been my personal experience, and it is my
opinion. Although I do not have a survey or citation to offer, I
recall other programmers at the time concurring with this opinion.
I would assert (if I had the hard data to prove it), as a
matter of historical experience, that BE systems were generally better
for network programming in the '70s than LE systems were, all other
factors being equal (of course, they never are).
</geezer-mode>
Craig Milo Rogers
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