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 the PDP-11 and many other computer architectures. A computer's or CPU's "sex" can also mean the endianness of the computer architecture used. [For hardware, the Jargon 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 as NUMSEX, and the Mac 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] ] , as HC11 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 use big 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. As file sharing has sometimes spread computer viruses, 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