"big endian" and "little endian"

[Perica]

..

[mystran]

Actually, I see the only complication of Little Endianess that when transferring data to Big Endian machine, you need to swap the bytes, which is impossible, unless you know the datastructure, but anyway, there's now reason why big endian would make life any simplier. I agree though, that having one universal format would be nice, which one, doesn't matter.

[sonneveld]

I thought it was more because you can read the whole number, or the lower byte/word from the same address. If you want to read the lower byte in a big endian system, you have to know how wide the number is first.

- Nick