On Tue, Jul 06, 2021 at 01:00:15PM +1200, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
Having used both kinds of computer architectures over the years, I agree. Little-endian ordering is more mathematically consistent.
What do you mean? They are both mathematically consistent. If one was not mathematically consistent it would not have even been used. Little-endian does have this advantage: If you place different length words at the same memory address, the low bytes of the shorter word lands at the same address as the low bytes of the longer word. This does not happen with big-endian. So, for example, you extend a 16-bit word at an address to a 32-bit word at the same address then on a big-endian system you have to shift the bytes that comprise the 16-bit word to a different memory address to construct the 32-bit word. That is not necessary on a little-endian system. Cheers, Michael.