On 01.10.2012 15:44, Igor Stasenko wrote:
On 1 October 2012 14:43, Sven Van Caekenberghe <[email protected]> wrote:
On 01 Oct 2012, at 14:01, Henrik Sperre Johansen <[email protected]>
wrote:
Endianness in header depends on the platform the image was saved on.
Which for all practical purposes, means little-endian these days.
How can an image be cross-platform, but the header not ?
Just another artifact of incremental development, i guess.
I don't know what reasoning was behind this, but IMO, defining header
to have fixed byte order
would be much better. Of course, it is always easier to think backwards.
However, things like IP header, were existed before squeak image
format. So, again,
i am clueless why guys decided that doing like it's done is a Good Idea (tm).
IIRC, the code that writes the image header is in Slang.
Using uints for fields there would be a logical choice, I would guess.
TBH, I don't think it would be much better if a byte order were enforced
for a single header field only.
Though, I personally would think it'd be nice if the format field were
to be expanded and kept symmetrical.
That way, deciphering the image formats numerical value could be done
independently of endianness (and knowing what #'s are valid formats).
As nice as backwards compatability though, considering there would be no
breaking image format changes per se? Probably not.
Cheers,
Henry
