Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site mprvaxa.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!hou3c!hocda!houxm!ihnp4!alberta!calgary!ubc-vision!mprvaxa!tbray From: tbray@mprvaxa.UUCP (Tim Bray) Newsgroups: net.lang Subject: bit ordering - war story Message-ID: <591@mprvaxa.UUCP> Date: Tue, 18-Sep-84 21:24:20 EDT Article-I.D.: mprvaxa.591 Posted: Tue Sep 18 21:24:20 1984 Date-Received: Tue, 25-Sep-84 05:48:27 EDT Organization: Microtel Pacific Research, Burnaby, B.C, Canada Lines: 17 A coupla years back, there was this little engineering company that had a decade's worth of financial records stored on tapes created by an IBM 1130 (a computer for real men), in binary floating point format. They had this shiny new VAX, and no data interchange facility. Solution - a VAX assembler routine which takes an 1130 double precision floating point number - six (6) bytes - and spits out the equivalent VAX double precision datum. Bit orders. Hah. You think you know about bit orders. Latent bits. Middle-ender word ordering. One's complement mantissas for negative numbers - any idea what that does to negative powers of 2? Of course, the auditors wet their collective pants when all the bottom lines in the million-dollar plus items started being off by a few pennies on the new computer. Tim Bray {ihnp4!alberta, decvax!microsoft} !ubc-vision!mprvaxa!tbray