[Info-vax] Attn VSI employees: Viable full system Itanium emulator for VMS ?

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 2/18/2022 2:15 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> On 2/18/22 13:18, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> On 2/18/2022 11:03 AM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>> On 2/18/2022 10:36 AM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>>>> On 2/18/22 09:12, John Dallman wrote:
>>>>> In article <69d0b812-0d53-42b6-af62-b0317973dfc9n at googlegroups.com>,
>>>>> xyzzy1959 at gmail.com (John Reagan) wrote:
>>>>>> On Thursday, February 17, 2022 at 2:28:46 PM UTC-5, Bill Gunshannon
>>>>>>> I can't understand the interest in HP-UX at all. It's just
>>>>>>> another proprietary Unix and not really one of the better ones.
>>>>>> Big endian
>>>>>
>>>>> What makes big-endian attractive to end-user organisations?
>>>>
>>>> What real difference does endianess make to anyone today?
>>>
>>> Bad/ugly code may only work with specific endianess.
>>>
>>> External data whether files or network protocols expecting
>>> a specific endianess. One could argue that all such code should
>>> use conversion functions between target and host to make
>>> the code portable, but a lot of code is not doing that.
>>
>> As an anecdotal example: note that GNU Cobol default to
>> big endian on Linux and Windows x86-64.
> 
> But what difference does the internal storage make?  COBOL can write
> out all the numbers in the same format we humans read them thus
> eliminating any concerns for endianess when exchanging data.  :-)

Internal storage does not matter for nice correct code. Internal
storage can matter for bad incorrect code.

It matters for external interfaces. And even though it is
possible to do all external interface using text format, then
the reality is that a lot of data is exchanged or stored in
binary format.

Arne