On Saturday, October 27, 2001, at 04:25 am, KurtWAppling wrote:
> Re; a bit off subject but my question is that if OSX mac and windows XP
> are
> both unix based,will this in turn lead to easier cross platform exchange?
> or
> are they still going to be so different between PC's and MAC's that
> gibberish to nothing results without emulators as it has been? thankyou in
> advance for your opinion.
For a start Unix doesn't even come into Windows XP. It's still good old
Microsoft home-grown stuff for the most part. The second is that
incompatibility between x86 PCs and Macs goes far beyond what OS you use.
The actual way information is stored is different, right down at
hexadecimal raw data level. The Mac uses a PowerPC or 68k processor. These
are derived from older Motorola designs and, as has been a standard at
Motorola,they use a way of organising hex numbers called Big Endian. This
is so called because, when numbers are organised into the two number
blocks seen while hex editing or reading in hex in a program, the bigger
one is at the end, IIRC. Intel dervied x86 processors use Little Endian
format whereby the smaller number is at the end of the pair. All quite
confusing an I don't completely grasp it myself. I have 3 housemates who
all do Comp. Sci degrees and one explained it once but it was a while ago.
It is this deep seated difference that has erected the barrier between
them and keeps programs from one running *directly* on another. It is
however possible, with some common programming languages such as C++ and
Java to compile the programs for different platforms, as long as no system
specific calls are made. This means we have seen many x86 Unix projects
migrate to OS X as a result of it's BSD basis.
Here endeth the lesson ;)
--
Mark Benson
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