[Python-Dev] Re: marshal / unmarshal

[Jack Jansen]

On 14-apr-05, at 15:08, David Robinow wrote:

> On 4/11/05, Tim Peters <tim.peters at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Heh.  I have a vague half-memory of _some_ box that stored the two
>> 4-byte "words" in an IEEE double in one order, but the bytes within
>> each word in the opposite order.  It's always something ...
>  I believe this was the Floating Instruction Set on the PDP 11/35.
> The fact that it's still remembered 30 years later shows how unusual 
> it was.

I think it was actually "logical", because all PDP-11s (there were 2 or 
3 FPU instructionsets/architecture in the family IIRC) stored 32 bit 
integers in middle-endian (high-order word first, but low-order byte 
first).

But note that neither of the PDP-11 FPUs were IEEE, that was a much 
later invention. At least, I didn't come across it until much later:-)
--
Jack Jansen, <Jack.Jansen at cwi.nl>, http://www.cwi.nl/~jack
If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma 
Goldman