From: Julia Thompson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "Robert J. Chassell" wrote:
> Daniel Defoe satirized this kind of distinction making by describing a > war between those who broke the pointed end of an egg and those broke > the more gently rounded end. Everyone agrees that major decisions > should not be based on the choice of which end of an egg to break.
I think you might mean Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver's Travels? (Dafoe wrote Robinson Crusoe). In GT, the little endians broke the pointier side, and the big endians broke the more rounded side.
As a bit of trivia, the computer world uses "big-endian" and "little-endian" to describe the bit/byte-ordering of computer words (of 2 or more bytes). Big Endian means the Most Significant Bit comes first, while Little Endian means the Least Significant Bit comes first. These terms were first applied to computers in this 1980 paper, "On Holy Wars and A Plea For Peace": http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/ien/ien137.txt In it, the author compared the MSB/LSB debate to the GT's endian war, and then argued for everyone standardizing on one or the other choice for the greater compatibility of all computers. Sadly, it is a failed cause.
I believe that Dr. Seuss's _The Butter Battle Book_ does something similar, in that there is a war between those who hold their bread butter side up and those who hold their bread butter side down. Had quite an arms race going there in that book.
Then there's his Star-Bellied Sneetches book, one of my favorites. (Probably second to The Lorax, my all-time favorite Seuss).
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