scott wrote:
>> But I reserve the right to continue to be irked when I have to take my 
>> beautiful code and litter it with statements to turn the numbers 
>> backwards at the start,
> 
> If you had them round the right way to start with you wouldn't need to 
> litter your code with anything :-P

Take the MD5 hash kernel, for example. Essentially you're supposed to 
load a word of data from the current block and mix it into the hash state.

Except for the minor detail that you can't just *load* it, you have to 
turn it backwards first, or you'll get the "wrong" answer (i.e., not the 
answer listed in the MD5 spec). It's not that the data you're trying to 
hash is backwards, it's just that MD5 is defined to operate backwards. 
Except, of course, that working completely backwards would be 
comparatively simple; no, MD5 is defined to work on words forwards, but 
each word must be written backwards. *sigh*

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