[squeak-dev] LittleSmalltalk and loading od 2004 .pr

David T. Lewis lewis at mail.msen.com
Fri Jun 29 21:44:38 UTC 2018


On Fri, Jun 29, 2018 at 05:28:31PM -0300, Edgar De Cleene wrote:
> Yes, this is the error.
> 
> > On 29 Jun 2018, at 17:04, H. Hirzel <hannes.hirzel at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > Result of dropping  LittleSmalltalk.001.pr onto the desktop of 5.2a:
> > the error message is attached
> 
> Why the endianness could be a problem if this is opened in 3.10.2 ?
> 

Squeak images are saved with the native byte ordering of the machine
from which they were saved (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness).
I believe that this is true of image segments also.

The platforms that we use today (Linux, Windows, OS X) are all little-endian,
but the older Mac machines were big-endian. If the project was originally
saved from a Mac, then it was probably saved in a big-endian format.

It is possible that Squeak has lost the ability to handle big-endian
images, and it may be that projects saved from older Macs cannot be
loaded into Squeak today.

If that is the case (and I am only guessing), then a possible workaround
would be to load the old projects into an old Squeak image, save the
project again to a new file, and then load that new project file into
a modern Squeak image.

Dave



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