On 2/1/21 1:59 PM, John Ames via cctech wrote:
> This one has always boggled me, because it's the one aspect of the > Endian Wars where there's a simple, straightforward answer grounded in > basic mathematics - base ^ digit-number only gives the correct > place-value when the lowest-order bit is numbered zero. It's beyond my > ken how anybody thought the reverse was *valid,* let alone a good > idea. For all that I agree with you that little-endian is clearly the right answer and for exactly the reason you state, it's pretty easy to see where big-endian representation came from. That's how we write numbers in English, we write them big-endian. There ya go, it's as simple as that. Sure, one can get into the story that our numbers come from Arabic and Arabic is written right-to-left so in fact they were originally little-endian and just didn't get flipped around when incorporated into left-to-right languages but that's all lost in the past. Today, we write numbers, in English, big-endian so it's no surprise at all that some computers followed that common practice. Dave
