Re: [PATCH] Add a birdview-on-the-source-code section to the user manual

[Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>]

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Hi,

On Tue, 8 May 2007, Karl Hasselström wrote:

> On 2007-05-08 23:07:04 +0200, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, 8 May 2007, Karl Hasselström wrote:
> >
> > > On 2007-05-08 17:10:47 +0200, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> > >
> > > > +  char *`, but is actually expected to be a pointer to `unsigned
> > > > +  char[20]`.  This variable will contain the big endian version of the
> > > > +  40-character hex string representation of the SHA-1.
> > >
> > > Either it should be "unsigned char[40]" (or possibly 41 with a
> > > terminating \0), or else you shouldn't be talking about
> > > hexadecimal since it's just a 20-byte big-endian unsigned integer.
> > > (A third possibility is that I'm totally confused.)
> >
> > It is 40 hex-character, but 20 _byte_. If you have any ideas how to
> > formulate that better than I did...
> 
> I think this is less confusing:
> 
>   This variable will contain the 160-bit SHA-1.
> 
> It avoids talking of hex, since it's not really stored in hex format
> any more than any other binary number with a number of bits divisible
> by four. And it avoids saying big-endian, which is not relevant anyway
> since we don't use hashes as integers.

Well, I do not buy into that. First, we _have_ to say that it is 
big-endian. It was utterly confusing to _me_ that the hash was not little 
endian, as I expected on an Intel processor.

And I'd rather mention the hex representation (what you see in git-log and 
git-ls-tree). This helps debugging, believe me.

Ciao,
Dscho