Re: Creating several types from a base type and conversion

[Ken Roberts <alisonken1@gmail.com>]

On Thursday, January 23, 2020 at 1:39:13 PM UTC-8, Optikos wrote:

<snip>

> Instead of depending on a big-language solution of a very-feature-rich compiler, there is a common industrial practice in both Ada and other languages that I mentioned in my 2 replies:  use 2 different packages with same-named identifiers (especially functions or procedures) to link in either the little-endian implementation or big-endian implementation (or any other nonportability that is peculiar to a target ISA or target OS).  This solution is at the heart of VIPER and MVVM software architectures for taming the portability beast quite well (going so far as to tame even radical philosophical departures among the very divergent GUIs/window-managers:  Gnome/GTK, Windows UWP, Win32, KDE/Qt, Tizen).

<snip>

It was my understanding that big/little-endian representations were mainly how data was accessed from memory that used 8-bit bytes for physical memory layout.

Using a 16-bit register as an example:

register: [first byte][second byte]

In big-endian format the memory usage would be:

adx 0: [first byte]
adx 1: [second byte]
adx 2: [first byte]
adx 3: [second byte]

In little-endian format the memory usage would be:

adx 0: [second byte]
adx 1: [first byte]
adx 2: [second byte]
adx 3: [first byte]

Is my understanding off?