On Tue, Aug 25, 2015 at 12:20 PM, Joey K Tuttle <j...@qued.com> wrote: > profile, which SHALL use value "II". The next two bytes contain the value > 42, which identifies the file as a TIFF file and is ordered according to the > value in the first two bytes of the header. The last four bytes give the ... > This stuck with me because in the original description the statement was > made that files (viewed as ASCII which is an OS assumption) started with MM > or II (I got that stood for Motorola vs Intel) followed by ("arbitrary but > carefully chosen character *") When I did a.i.'*' and observed that it > was 42, I assumed it was homage to Douglas Adams and have smiled about it > ever since.
Since there are two byte to represent 42, I think they are talking about: a.i.(,:|.)'42' 52 50 50 52 Here, 52 50 would be bigendian order (most significant to least significant - what another message has suggested is the 'wrong' order) and 50 52 would be littleendian order (least significant to most significant). Presumably there was some mnemonic reasoning going on here, when that spec was getting written? Also, a.i.'*' 42 is only one byte. (Or am I missing something?) Thanks, -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm