Lou,
Sure, historical reasons count, but why stopping at micro-processor era and
not a few centuries back?
If only european would have understood and adopted the true arabic number
notation, our world would be dominated by little endian anyway ;)

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!

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).

;)

Nicolas


2013/4/1 Louis LaBrunda <Lou at keystone-software.com>

> Hi Eliot,
>
> >> Well that's really my point.  Little endian had a very, very tiny and
> >> predictably short lived advantage over big endian in single-byte
> fetching
> >> computers only.  I'm pretty sure mainframes (big endian) with multi-byte
> >> fetching existed when little endian first came along.  Anyone thinking
> to
> >> implement little endian should have realized it would lose that
> advantage
> >> soon.
>
> >??  And how many bigendian micros are there in common use nowadays??
>
> There are a lot of reasons micro processor architectures survive or not.
> Were the early Intel little endian processors really better than the
> Motorola 68000 big endian designs?  Intel chips and maybe even the company
> could have died if IBM had chosen the Motorola chip over Intel for the IBM
> PC.
>
> I expect if little endian were never invented, no one would miss it.  We
> would just code with big endian data and never think about it.
>
> Would you trade little endian for more registers?
>
> >> >If so, why the hell would multi-byte fetching annihilate the advantage
> >> >of one endianness and preserve the advantage of the other?
> >>
> >> Big endian remains simple, little endian (not simple) lost the slight
> speed
> >> advantage.
>
> >Not for many machine-level operations.  AFAICT big endian's only advantage
> >is in reading hex dumps.  Thankfully I don't debug like that.
>
> Back when they first came out that was how you had to debug.  Back then it
> drove me nuts trying to figure out what I was looking at.
>
> >Look at a marshaller or a data copier that has to deal with items of
> different size,
> >e.g. extracting fields from the middle of a struct etc and little endian's
> >advantage becomes clear.
>
> Is it a speed advantage or just simpler code?  Is it much simpler or just a
> little math to get the right byte at the right time?
>
> I have a program that gets big endian float data and has to convert it to
> little endian float.  So when little endian was invented that's just what
> the computing world needed, another way computers would have a hard time
> communicating with each other.
>
> If little endian came first, maybe I wouldn't be able to come up with a
> good reason to have (add) big endian but it didn't and I don't see a good
> reason for little endian to have been invented.  It just complicated things
> for little value.
>
> >But forgive me, I shouldn't even be starting this thread :)
>
> Too late.
>
> Lou
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> Louis LaBrunda
> Keystone Software Corp.
> SkypeMe callto://PhotonDemon
> mailto:Lou at Keystone-Software.com http://www.Keystone-Software.com
>
>
>
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