This week (week 5 of the term), we'll look at a miscellany of topics
before diving into the heart of the course (Chapter 4: The Processor) after midterm break.
Here's a list of readings that will help introduce you to this week's topics, in
the order in which we'll examine them, roughly one topic per class day.
- There's a weird and important concept called "byte order" or "endianness" that
well-educated programmers and computer scientists need to know about. In some
sense, it's trivial, but it has wide-spread implications for the functioning of
computer systems. The
Wikipedia entry on Endianness
is a fine starting place. It's also worth reading the famous paper on the topic
(which adopted the terminology "endianness"): Danny Cohen's
On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace.
(That link to Cohen's paper lacks the pictures that appeared on initial publication.
Here's a bad scan
if you want to see them.) Finally, to get the full flavor of the topic, you might
want to read Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.
Read Section 3.3 of Patterson and Hennessy, on Multiplication.
Read Section 3.5 of Patterson and Hennessy, on Floating Point.