Re: [DotGNU]Endianness?

[Fergus Henderson]

On 08-Nov-2003, Rhys Weatherley <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Saturday 08 November 2003 08:01 am, Rich Baumann wrote:
> > On Fri, 2003-11-07 at 12:30, HJ wrote:
> > > Is it known wether MS.NET is host-endian or little-endian always?
> >
> > The ECMA spec requires that conforming CLRs always be little-endian.
> 
> No it doesn't.  The encoding of programs, when stored in IL binaries, is 
> little-endian (you have to pick something for the on-the-wire format).  But 
> there are no ECMA-specified endian restrictions on the CLR's data 
> representation once the program is loaded.  Restrictions may occur because of 
> badly written compilers (e.g. Microsoft's C/C++ compiler), but not because of 
> anything that ECMA specifies.

Does Microsoft's C/C++ compiler actually generate code which _requires_
that the CLR's run-time data representation be little-endian?

Or does it just generate code whose behaviour might be different
if run on a system with different endianness?

If the latter, why would you consider it bad for a C/C++ compiler
to generate code whose behaviour may depend on the enddianess of the
target system?

-- 
Fergus Henderson <address@hidden>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
The University of Melbourne         |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.