From: quadibloc@invalid.invalid   
      
   On Fri, 03 Oct 2025 08:58:32 +0000, Anton Ertl quoted:   
   > |If somebody really wants to create bad hardware in this day and age,   
   > |please do make it big-endian, and also add the following very   
   > |traditional features for sh*t-for-brains hardware:   
      
   I think that for a computer to be big-endian is a good thing.   
      
   It makes it easier to understand core dumps, as numbers are stored just as   
   they are written.   
      
   But more importantly, it means that binary integers are ordered the same   
   way as packed decimal integers, which are ordered the same way as integers   
   in character text form.   
      
   As for the _rest_ of the items, though, all of them are indeed bad things.   
      
   But some are worse than others.   
      
   > | - only do aligned memory accesses   
      
   Nearly all memory access are, or could be, aligned. Performance is   
   improved if they are. As long as there's some provision to handle   
   unaligned data, such as a move characters instruction, data structures can   
   be dealt with for things like communications formats.   
   I'm not saying it isn't bad, just that it was excusable before we had as   
   many transistors available as we do now.   
      
   > | - expose your pipeline details in the ISA   
      
   The original MIPS did this. This is bad indeed, as whatever you do in this   
   direction won't be applicable to later iterations of the ISA as technology   
   advances.   
      
   Failing to support the entire IEEE 754 floating-point standard just needs   
   to be documented. Expecting software to fake it being implemented is not   
   reasonable: as long as denormals instead produce zero as the result, one   
   just has an inferior floating-point format, not a computer that doesn't   
   work.   
   Once again, bad, but not all that terrible.   
      
   But anything that means that programs could randomly fail because   
   interrupts don't properly save or restore the entire machine state...   
   *that* is catastrophically bad, and hardly compares to his other examples.   
      
   John Savard   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)