APL\360

[Fred Cisin]

>>>>>We don't need another big-endian/little-endian battle

On Mon, 1 Feb 2021, Peter Corlett via cctalk wrote:
> Little-endian tends to be more useful when doing multi-word arithmetic.
> Big-endian is handy for text and human-readable numbers. That there are
> heated arguments over which endianness is best mainly tells us that there's
> bugger all in it either way. After all, the word "endian" is a satirical
> device in Gulliver's Travels.

But, since computers weren't common among his readers in 1726,
they wouldn't have understood the competing computer architectures
of Lilliput and Blefescu, so he had to rewrite the issue in terms of
opening eggs.


https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Spring_2003/ling538/Lecnotes/ADfn1.htm