Yoshiki Ohshima wrote:
>> I did not see anything about endianness conversion. where is it ?
>> Or Is squeak only for little endian machines ?
> 
>   Of course, it runs on both endianness.  Look at the
> ShortIntegerArray, and other classes that implement
> #restoreEndianness.

Actually, it's better *not* to look at #restoreEndianness - it's a red 
herring (and the name is wrong, too). The method doesn't really 
"restore" anything; all it does is swapping (byte, short, word) 
quantities if called on a little endian platform (in other words, it's 
always a no-op on big-enders and will be broken if called "the wrong 
number of times" on little-enders[*]). A better place to look at is 
ShortIntegerArray and friends (see the class-side methods, in particular 
#startUp) since they have to implement endianness conversion manually 
for lack of VM support.

[*] Even the definition of "wrong number of times" depends on whether 
the array in question was loaded in a big- or little-endian format, or 
if it was internal to begin with. And of course, if you load a 
little-endian array on a big-endian platform and expect 
#restoreEndianness to fix that, it won't work either. Confused? Well, I 
told you not to look there ;-)


Cheers,
   - Andreas