Re: [RFC] ASLA design, depth of code review and lack thereof

[Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>]

At Fri, 4 Jun 2004 16:29:20 -0700 (PDT),
Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Sat, 5 Jun 2004 viro@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk wrote:
> >
> > 
> >         case SNDRV_PCM_FORMAT_FLOAT_BE:
> >         {
> >                 union {
> >                         float f;
> >                         u_int32_t i;
> >                 } u;
> >                 u.f = 0.0;
> > #ifdef SNDRV_LITTLE_ENDIAN
> >                 return bswap_32(u.i);
> > #else
> >                 return u.i;
> > #endif
> 
> So what I wonder about is why anybody does something like this in the 
> first place?
> 
> Any IEEE format architecture will make 0.0 be all-zeroes, last I saw. In
> fact, any architecture (IEEE or not) where that isn't true will have
> serious problems with floating point values in bss (hint: the bss isn't
> initialzed to 0.0, it's initialized to the bit pattern 0).
> 
> So what the above boils dow to is a very very strange way of writing
> 
> 	return 0;
> 
> and it has absolutely _zero_ to do with "little-endian" or anything else 
> for that matter.

Yes, fully agreed.
We'll fix the code around this.


--
Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>		ALSA Developer - www.alsa-project.org