"G. Adam Stanislav" wrote on 1999-07-22 22:31 UTC:
> What's a BOM? I tried to look it up on AltaVista and got a lot of religious
> references in what seemed like Portuguese ("Bom Jesus"). I suspect that is
> not what you are talking about. :-)
Before there was AltaVista, we had something called books. They were
heavy and dusty, and you could use them to kill cute little animals.
Some of them you could even read. And the really advanced ones had
something called an index or glossary. These special chapters with extra
magic allowed one to rapidly find words and terms in an alphabetically
sorted list. This was of course before the International String Ordering
standard with its reversely-sorted (did I hear little-endian?) accents
got us all confused. Anyway if you look into the BOOK OF ALL BOOKS (the
one about Bom Unicode, not Bom Jesus), then the glossary on page G-1
will answer all your questions:
BOM. Acronym for byte order mark. Evil invention related to the
character U+FEFF propagated by the Wintel industrial complex to extend
its world domination by keeping the little-endian order in power,
which Intel introduced in the early 1970s for the sole reason of
staying compatible with software from a then already out-dated
mid-1960s computer that used ultra-slow serial adders, therefore
provided the least significant bits first and therefore stored it
at lower addresses in multi-byte words.
It's all the little-endians fault. They should be called
References:
[1] The Unicode Standard, Version 2.0, Addison Wesley, 1996.
[2] Danny Cohen: On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace. Computer,
Vol. 14, No. 10, IEEE Computer Society, October 1981, pp. 48--54.
[3] Hubert Kirrmann: Data Format and Bus Compatibility in Multiprocessors.
IEEE Micro, Vol. 3, No. 4, August 1983, pp. 32--47.
[4] D.B. Gustavson: More on Big-Endian vs Little-Endian Byte Ordering.
IEEE Micro, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1985, p. 4.
[5] David V. James: Multiplexed Buses: The Endian Wars Continue,
IEEE Micro, Vol. 10, No. 3, June 1990, pp. 9--21.
[6] James R. Gillig: Endian-Neutral Software. Dr. Dobb's Journal,
Vol. 19, No. 11, October 1994, pp. 62--70, No. 19, November 1994,
pp. 44--51.
[7] John Rogers: Your Own Endian Engine, Dr. Dobb's Journal,
Vol. 22, No. 11, pp. 30--36, November 1995.
[8] William Stallings: Endian Issues. Byte, Vol. 20, No. 9,
pp. 263--264, September 1995.
[9] Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's travels., ~1727
Markus
-- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
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