Re: [Caml-list] Bug in caml_string_get16?

[Ivan Gotovchits <ivg@ieee.org>]

Nicolas Trangez <nicolas@incubaid.com> writes:

> What would you expect to be the output of this code?

It should fail :)

In a string literal any symbol that you can type with your keyboard is
stored in a special encoding called ASCII. With "1" you have just
created a string containig a single byte with a value 49. So, first off
all, your string is too short, because it has length of 1, when int16
obviously needs two bytes of storage space.  If you really interested,
binary 1 will be represented in a memory of a little endian computer
like this: "\x01\x00". The special escape symbol "\" allows us to type
untypable. The the code

    open EndianString
    let d = LittleEndian.get_int16 "\x01\x00" 0

will yield:

    val d : int = 1

By the way, if we try your string (with a more correct invocation):

    open EndianString
    let d = LittleEndian.get_int8 "1" 0

we will got:

    val d : int = 49

Futher reading:

1. man ascii
2. wikipedia article on endianess 


Good luck!

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