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From: mitchalsup@aol.com (MitchAlsup1)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Byte Addressability And Beyond
Date: Wed, 1 May 2024 16:38:09 +0000
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

> On Wed, 1 May 2024 03:02:07 +0000, MitchAlsup1 wrote:

>> I don't see what is wrong with loading a container with the field and
>> then extracting or inserting into the container.

> You still need a place to put a bit offset for the base address of the 
> field. Why not put it together with the rest of the address?

Given a 20-40 year life of an architecture and the desire not to be limited
by addressability; I wanted and demanded of myself a full 63-bit virtual 
address space per thread. Therefore, no bits in the pointer are available
for bit level addressing.

>> BE means you can read the strings in a core dump
>> LE means the bytes arrive in the order for on-line arithmetic
>> LE allows one to make 8-bit wide data paths and still implement a full
>> width architecture {but then so did 360/30)

> The way I think of it is: consider how you specify these 3 conventions:
> * numbering of bits within a byte
> * numbering of bytes within a multibyte quantity
> * the place values of bits in an integer

> The only way to get all 3 consistent is with a little-endian architecture. 
> Every big-endian architecture has inconsistencies between these somewhere 
> or another.

Very many LE machines got one or more of those wrong, too.