Re: [NoW] A question about mixed-endianness

[Roberto Ierusalimschy <roberto@...>]

> It's Wednesday again.
> It's time for nitpicking  :-)

Again, thanks for the suggestions.


> 3)  Mixed-endianness
> 
> "Mixed-endian" means that endianness is neither little-endian nor
> big-endian.
> According to Wikipedia, such CPUs do exist.
> I'm trying to determine whether Lua 5.3 support mixed-endian platforms or
> not?
> 
> [...]
> 
> My second guess was "no", because of *string.pack()* and *string.unpack()*
> [...]

It seems a little harsh to say that Lua does not support mixed-endian
platforms just because of these two functions (that still work Ok for
non-native endianness). We added a note in the manual explaining that
"native mode" assumes either little or big-endian, and therefore may
not work correctly on mixed-endian formats.

-- Roberto