- SEX (computing)
: "The acronym SEX (written in capital letters) redirects here. For other meanings, see
Sex (disambiguation) ."In computing, the SEX
assembly language mnemonic has often been used for the "Sign EXtend
" machine instruction found in thePDP-11 and many other computer architectures. A computer's or CPU's "sex" can also mean theendianness of thecomputer architecture used. [For hardware, theJargon File also reports the less common expression "byte sex" [http://catb.org/jargon/html/B/byte-sex.html] . It is unclear whether this terminology is also used when more than two orderings are possible. Similarly, the manual for the ORCA/M assembler refers to a field indicating the order of the bytes in a number field asNUMSEX
, and theMac OS X operating system refers to "byte sex" in its compiler tools [http://web.mit.edu/darwin/src/modules/cctools/libstuff/arch.c] .]x86 computers do not have the same "byte sex" [The [http://catb.org/jargon/html/B/bytesexual.html Jargon] [http://catb.org/jargon/html/B/byte-sex.html file] ] , asHC11 computers, for example. Functions are sometimes needed [ [http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/output/html/singlepage/bgnet.html#htonsman htons(), htonl(), ntohs(), ntohl()] ] for computers of different endianness to communicate with each other over the internet [The [http://catb.org/jargon/html/N/NUXI-problem.html NUXI] problem] , as protocols often usebig endian byte coding by default.EX in software: rarely used jargon
The
TLA SEX has humorously been said to stand for "Software EXchange", meaning copying of software. Asfile sharing has sometimes spreadcomputer virus es, it has been stated that “illicit SEX can transmit viral diseases to your computer.”Other sightings
The Commodore 64 Video Interface Chip (VIC) II contains registers to double the size of the hardware sprites in one or both directions. The register $d017 (Sprite EXpand Y) contains 1 bit per sprite to allow expansion in the Y direction, while $d01d (Sprite EXpand X) alters the X size in the same manner.
References
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