Re: [RFC] ASLA design, depth of code review and lack thereof

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>]

On Sat, 5 Jun 2004 viro@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk wrote:
>
> 
>         case SNDRV_PCM_FORMAT_FLOAT_BE:
>         {
>                 union {
>                         float f;
>                         u_int32_t i;
>                 } u;
>                 u.f = 0.0;
> #ifdef SNDRV_LITTLE_ENDIAN
>                 return bswap_32(u.i);
> #else
>                 return u.i;
> #endif

So what I wonder about is why anybody does something like this in the 
first place?

Any IEEE format architecture will make 0.0 be all-zeroes, last I saw. In
fact, any architecture (IEEE or not) where that isn't true will have
serious problems with floating point values in bss (hint: the bss isn't
initialzed to 0.0, it's initialized to the bit pattern 0).

So what the above boils dow to is a very very strange way of writing

	return 0;

and it has absolutely _zero_ to do with "little-endian" or anything else 
for that matter.

		Linus