On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 4:33 PM, John Gilmore <[email protected]> wrote:
> The little- vs big-endian difference/controversy has always struck me > as an unfortunate instance of specifically American monoglot > provincialism. > > The notion that the practice of writing things from left to right > reflects sovereign virtue and its corollary, that those who use > another convention are lesser species within the swarm, were never > viable ones. > > Any convention will be wrong some of the time. One thus needs > instructions for reversing strings in storage and for right-to-left > 'searches', INDEX and the like, too. > > z/Architecture machines and others too now make them available, but > they were too long coming. I had the dubious pleasure of devising > mainframe Persian-language human interfaces in the 1970s; and, while > possible, doing so was made gratuitously complicated [in a fashion > that was without much intellectual interest] by the provincial > mainframe architectures of the time. For the record, MVCIN has been around since the 4300s. (Machines, not 4300BC!) -- zMan -- "I've got a mainframe and I'm not afraid to use it" ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
