[no subject]
On Mon, 23 Jun 2014 11:02:10 +0200 Vincent Lefèvre wrote:
> This is how I understand it: the mapping of bits to the memory is
> entirely unspecified by the standard.
I think we all agree on this. As Dima points out, it's the external
representation we're talking about, in a network or file stream.
We'll try to make this crystal clear...
> 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.
I thought the world had become more reasonable since the growing pains of
the 1980s, when formats evolved from 8 to 16 to 32 and finally 64 bits.
So there was (is there still?) a mixed-endian representation of an IEEE 754
format. I knew that some of the various Vax FP formats were mixed-Endian.
In any case, I agree that we can't handle all bizarre cases, and am not quite
sure what to say about them, should they arise, other than perhaps to define
their own non-conflicting signature. But I don't want to be totally silent
about the issue, like 754-2008. As I mentioned in an earlier post, 754 could
get away with it because it only defined the representation of a single datum
and not of an ordered aggregate, as 1788 has to.
Michel.
---Sent: 2014-06-23 14:47:20 UTC