Re: Byte Addressability And Beyond

On Tue, 07 May 2024 19:16:40 -0600, John Savard wrote:

Character strings are in big-endian order.

Better thought of as “character strings are stored so ascending addresses
correspond to logical reading order”. Note I didn’t say “display order”,
since that can be quite different.

Packed decimal strings should be in the same order as character strings,
so that the relationship between the two is simple and conversion
between the two is quick.

Now here you are getting into cultural issues, For example, while both
Arabic and Hebrew use decimal numbers, they write the digits in opposite
order.

Computer-internal formats should be optimized for computer-internal
operations. Conversion from/to human-comprehensible layout/ordering/
formatting should happen when accepting human input and displaying output
for humans. The two should be kept separate, so the former remains
independent of the latter, and the latter can be easily reconfigured.