Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> I've found it's worth the effort, at least when talking to other technical 
>> people, to be precise and consistent about such things. :-)
> 
>   At least "big-endian" and "little-endian" are unambiguous in that
> everybody uses them with the same meaning, even though the names are
> completely backwards compared to what they mean (probably causing
> confusion to people learning them for the first time).

Yeah. It's the same basic problem, tho. We write the small numbers first, 
and larger addresses come later on the screen.

I saw someone once arguing that a hex dump should be like this:

..... F  E  C  D  B  A  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1  0 | 0123456789ABCDEF
0100: 0A 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 40 20 20 20 20 20|      @IHGFEDCBA\r
0110:   ...
0120:
0130:

So, basically, the numbers are addressed right to left, while the text is
addressed left to right. Then little-endian is just as readable as 
big-endian.  While making bit zero be the LSB[1] of a byte or a register at 
least has some mathematical backing, the endian-ness never seemed to really 
make much difference as long as it was treated consistently, in my experience.


[1] And bit zero was the MSB on the mainframe I worked with. And, honestly, 
I don't remember the endian-ness of it, because it never came up, because 
the address pointing to a character was a different size than the address 
pointing to a word or a double-word or whatever. If I had to guess, I'd 
guess it was big-endian, but I'd have to look it up to be sure.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
    C# - a language whose greatest drawback
    is that its best implementation comes
    from a company that doesn't hate Microsoft.

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