Author: James B. Shearer
Date: 09:33:49 05/21/99
Go up one level in this thread
On May 20, 1999 at 00:16:15, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>On May 19, 1999 at 22:39:24, James B. Shearer wrote:
<snip>
>> There are potentially other endian issues. It is easy enough to write
>>a program which only runs correctly on big (or little) endian machines. Perhaps
>>the "stock" DB has no such dependencies but it is not a given.
>>
>
>endian is only an issue _between_ machines. It is transparent on a single
>machine. And if the PCI interface 'hides' this from the PC architecture,
>then no problem would be apparent. Hsu, campbell, etc are not inexperienced
>programmers... any more than folks like Eugene and myself are inexperienced.
>We've had no problems in doing things like making the tablebase stuff work
>across endianness issues... And Crafty is a perfect example where it works
>on either big or little-endian architectures with no problems at all... This
>would seem (to me) to be a minor point that might take a couple of hours to
>resolve, if that... not a budget-affecting issue IMHO.
Suppose you have a structure which you address as 4*n bytes or as n
32 bit words. If you move to a machine of different endian type the bytes will
not have the expected relationship to the words and your program may fail.
Depending on how pervasive this sort of thing is it may take more than a couple
of hours to resolve particulary if the code was written by someone else.
James B. Shearer
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