<div dir="ltr"><div>Lou,<br>Sure, historical reasons count, but why stopping at micro-processor era and not a few centuries back?<br>If only european would have understood and adopted the true arabic number notation, our world would be dominated by little endian anyway ;)<br>
<br>Speaking of communications, I note that the least significant bit in a byte is
still sent first on a serial line, ethernet included, while we prefer sending most
significant byte first in a 32-bit word, what a mess!<br><br></div><div>Anyway, big or little, we shall better admit our inferiority: a middle endian formatted germane brain will swim in those swamps better than we will ever do (huntert drei und swanzig).<br>
</div><div><br>;)<br><br></div>Nicolas<br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">2013/4/1 Louis LaBrunda <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:Lou@keystone-software.com" target="_blank">Lou@keystone-software.com</a>></span><br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Hi Eliot,<br>
<div class="im"><br>
>> Well that's really my point. Little endian had a very, very tiny and<br>
>> predictably short lived advantage over big endian in single-byte fetching<br>
>> computers only. I'm pretty sure mainframes (big endian) with multi-byte<br>
>> fetching existed when little endian first came along. Anyone thinking to<br>
>> implement little endian should have realized it would lose that advantage<br>
>> soon.<br>
<br>
>?? And how many bigendian micros are there in common use nowadays??<br>
<br>
</div>There are a lot of reasons micro processor architectures survive or not.<br>
Were the early Intel little endian processors really better than the<br>
Motorola 68000 big endian designs? Intel chips and maybe even the company<br>
could have died if IBM had chosen the Motorola chip over Intel for the IBM<br>
PC.<br>
<br>
I expect if little endian were never invented, no one would miss it. We<br>
would just code with big endian data and never think about it.<br>
<br>
Would you trade little endian for more registers?<br>
<div class="im"><br>
>> >If so, why the hell would multi-byte fetching annihilate the advantage<br>
>> >of one endianness and preserve the advantage of the other?<br>
>><br>
>> Big endian remains simple, little endian (not simple) lost the slight speed<br>
>> advantage.<br>
<br>
>Not for many machine-level operations. AFAICT big endian's only advantage<br>
>is in reading hex dumps. Thankfully I don't debug like that.<br>
<br>
</div>Back when they first came out that was how you had to debug. Back then it<br>
drove me nuts trying to figure out what I was looking at.<br>
<div class="im"><br>
>Look at a marshaller or a data copier that has to deal with items of different size,<br>
>e.g. extracting fields from the middle of a struct etc and little endian's<br>
>advantage becomes clear.<br>
<br>
</div>Is it a speed advantage or just simpler code? Is it much simpler or just a<br>
little math to get the right byte at the right time?<br>
<br>
I have a program that gets big endian float data and has to convert it to<br>
little endian float. So when little endian was invented that's just what<br>
the computing world needed, another way computers would have a hard time<br>
communicating with each other.<br>
<br>
If little endian came first, maybe I wouldn't be able to come up with a<br>
good reason to have (add) big endian but it didn't and I don't see a good<br>
reason for little endian to have been invented. It just complicated things<br>
for little value.<br>
<div class="im"><br>
>But forgive me, I shouldn't even be starting this thread :)<br>
<br>
</div>Too late.<br>
<br>
Lou<br>
<div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5">-----------------------------------------------------------<br>
Louis LaBrunda<br>
Keystone Software Corp.<br>
SkypeMe callto://PhotonDemon<br>
mailto:<a href="mailto:Lou@Keystone-Software.com">Lou@Keystone-Software.com</a> <a href="http://www.Keystone-Software.com" target="_blank">http://www.Keystone-Software.com</a><br>
<br>
<br>
</div></div></blockquote></div><br></div>