>> When you read data from a first, you read the first byte first, and 
>> the last byte last. Therefore, the first byte should be the MSB.
> 
> Seriously: Why? Just because us Westerners writing numbers this way round?

Because the most significant digit is the most important piece of 
information. It's "most significant".

>> And now we have the spectacle
>> of cryptosystems and so forth designed with each data block being 
>> split into octets and reversed before you can process it...
> 
> That is not because little-endian would be wrong, but because the 
> cryptosystems usually happen to be specified to use big-endian in- and 
> output.

Erm, NO.

This happens because most cryptosystems are (IMHO incorrectly) specified 
to *not* use big-endian encoding.

This means that if I want to implement such a system, I have to waste 
time and effort turning all the numbers backwards before I can process 
them, and turning them back the right way around again afterwards. It 
also means that when a paper says 0x3847275F, I can't tell whether they 
actually mean 3847275F hex, or whether they really mean 5F274738 hex, 
which is a completely different number.

> Wouldn't it be more convenient to start with the least significant 
> digit, and stop the transmission once you have transmitted the most 
> significant nonzero digit? If you did that the other way round, you'd 
> have no way to know how long the number will be, and won't be able to 
> determine the actual value of each individual digit until after the 
> transmission.

If you start from the least digit, you *still* can't determine the final 
size of the number until all digits are received.

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