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Re: Michel's comments on interchange representation



On 2014-06-18 11:07:20 +0000, John Pryce wrote:
> I don't think this is such a substantive issue as you suggest. In
> discussions between Dmitry, Guillaume and me (also Juergen and Ned?)
> about this, I believe it was agreed that the bitstring specified by
> the interchange format is *conceptual* and endianness is to be never
> mentioned.

This is how I understand it: the mapping of bits to the memory is
entirely unspecified by the standard.

> IMO the map between this and physical storage, defined by the
> hardware's endianness and possibly by the compiler,

There may be even more possibilities that endianness. An implementation
could choose to introduce some form of mix-endianness (a bit like old
ARM's for binary64), padding bits, possibly holes, and so on.

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Vincent Lefèvre <vincent@xxxxxxxxxx> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/>
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