<<Actually, I was wondering whether the Java Language Spec says anything
about what byte order should prevail.>>
You are looking in the *wrong* place , try these two excellent books on the
Java Virtual machines,
1.) "The Java Virtual Machine by Jon Meyer and Troy Downing (Publisher
O'Reilly)"
2.) "Inside the Java Virtual Machine by Bill Venners ( publisher McGraw - Hill
)
This book is my favorite.
And then there is the JVM Spec from Sun.
Cheers
Chris.
"Robert P. Biuk-Aghai" wrote:
> On Tue, 2 Feb 1999, Peter Naulls wrote:
>
> > > Don't know if this helps, but I read in the Java Glossary
> > > (http://mindprod.com/gloss.html):
> > >
> > > "Java stores binary values internally and in files MSB (Most
> > > Significant Byte) first, i.e. high order part first. This is
> > > referred to as big-endian byte sex or sometimes network order."
> >
> > Rubbish. They're in MSB in classfiles, but internally, the JVM will
> > whatever is the platform's way round, otherwise it'll have to
> > convert everytime it does things like addition (and that would of
> > course be slow).
> >
> > On a small-endian machine, the values would only be converted to
> > big-endian when they're written to a file, or sent out over the network.
>
> Actually, I was wondering whether the Java Language Spec says anything
> about what byte order should prevail. I searched for it but couldn't
> find anything about endianness or byte order. Then again, I didn't
> read the whole darn lot.
>
> I now have two different opinions. Some say Java is big-endian, some
> say it depends which machine it's on. Who's right? Proofs, please.
>
> Robert.
>
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
> Robert P Biuk-Aghai, University of Macau, Faculty of Science and Technology
> http://hyperg.sftw.umac.mo/robert/ tel: +853-3974365 fax: +853-838314
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
> Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question and the answer is no.
