It's big-endian, but so is TCP/IP framing. Indeed, in some contexts big-endian order is actually called "network order". Given the portable (r6rs bytevector) aka (scheme bytevectors) library, which makes BE and LE equally easy to handle, I don't think it matters much.

New Hope is actually in Pennsylvania, across the Delaware from New Jersey. :-)

On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 9:43 AM <xxxxxx@ancell-ent.com> wrote:

Heh.

Although can we say that it's semi- or slightly evil since like most wire protocols back then it's big-endian, and today's systems aren't, excepting per Wikipedia and my memory anything derived from the 68000, like its present ColdFire version and Oracle Solaris on bi-endian SPARC systems, plus z/Architecture (IBM mainframes, which can run Linux), IBM AIX on bi-endian POWER (but not Linux on POWER). Today's two monster ISAs, x86 and ARM are little endian or bi-endian and default run little-endian, plus the perhaps up and coming New Hope/New Jersey style RISC-V.

I suppose this shouldn't matter for a language family that depends on garbage collection, and most if not all of the CPUs Schemes run on, but it's at least a nit, and perhaps makes looking at the bytes on the wire more difficult.

Looking forward to the "why" etc. posting.

- Harold