<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 10:10 AM, Nadav Har'El <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:nyh@math.technion.ac.il">nyh@math.technion.ac.il</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
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</div>When you say "words" and "word aligned" here, you mean historic 2 byte words.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Indeed. Is there any other meaning for "word" other than two bytes?</div>
<div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
This is indeed *NOT* a very useful default on any modern computers. In some<br>
old computers, like the PDP11 2 byte words were common and useful.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I'm still not convinced that it was a useful default. Since C which is the lingua fanca of Unix was clearly bytes based.</div>
<div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">I guess nobody cares because since the 1970s when these tools were<br>
written, nobody uses them any more ;-) I don't think I used "od" in at<br>
least two decade...</blockquote><div><br></div><div>Well, I use them if I need to quickly inspect a file in binary format when I'm already using the command line. Say, I'm having a unit test that implements a binary protocol, and I want to verify with my eyes that I'm getting the right results. ./generate_msg | hexdump -C is quicker than ./generate_msg >tmp && sane_hex_editor tmp. How do you do that without hexdump, if you actually have this need at all.</div>
<div><br></div><div>But maybe it's just a bad old habit of mine. I guess that if you get used to a more modern workflow, you can make using modern tools to inspect the same data just as quickly. As you can understand, less will not help me with that.</div>
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