> I cant remember the terminology (someone jog my memory) but the vax
> counts using the most signigicant bits first doesnt it?  (pc's use
> least significant)

No; by definition, everything counts from the least significnat bit
first - that's what "least significant" _means_.  (Unless you mean
something other than which bits change most rapidly when counting.  All
I can think of is bit numbering for things like the bitfield
instructions, and if memory serves the VAX counts those with the LSb
being bit 0.)

The terms you are probably looking for are little-endian and
big-endian (referring to storing a multibyte quantity in memory and
asking whether the LSB or MSB is stored at the lowest byte address)--
but both VAXen and peecees are little-endian, so I'm not sure.

> If so, what would the result be if copying this 64 bit int to a 32
> bit int?  I guess it would just loose a lot of its accuracy.

Well, lose, but yes; any machine has to be careful to extract the
correct bits when copying from a 64-bit object to a 32-bit object, and
yes, you will perforce lose half the bits when doing so.  In some
circumstances you want to keep the high half, others the low half (and
in a few oddball cases you want some other subset of the bits); it's
just a question of being careful to do the copy correctly for the bits
you want to extract.

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Isn't it rather silly to put that sort of thing on list mail?

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