Am 02.08.2010 21:16, schrieb Darren New:

>> 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.

Actually the terms "big-endian" and "little-endian" are only confusing 
as long as you don't know about their etymology. If you do, it's 
actually pretty easy to remember that "big-endian" is, of course, the 
byte ordering that /starts/ with the "big end".

Aside from that, the knowledge also helps to lean back and grin a deep 
grin about the unintended hidden irony in rants like "little-endian byte 
order clearly gets it all wrong, big-endian is the only sane thing!" - 
or just vice versa. Yeah, sure, eggheads :-)

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