On the other hand, unsigned big-endian numbers sort lexographically and numerically the same way. So, for instance, if you're using a b+ tree to store time ser

On the other hand, unsigned big-endian numbers sort lexographically and numerically the same way. So, for instance, if you're using a b+ tree to store time series of key-value pairs, you can use tuples of <key, big_endian_timestamp> as your b+ tree keys and use memcmp() on the raw bytes of your keys. For variable-length integers, using a UTF-8-like big-endian encoding allows you to keep the relationship between lexographic and numeric sorting. This is also a huge advantage of ISO 8601 over other date formats.