3 ms·
Strictly speaking no one uses big endian, all computers I know of are either little endian or mixed endian ('mixed. because they do strings low to high but numb
by Taniwha 6y ago
Strictly speaking no one uses big endian, all computers I know of are either little endian or mixed endian ('mixed. because they do strings low to high but numbers high to low).
The only reason that big/mixed endian is even an issue is because some monks fucked up back when the Moors were driven from Spain ... in the wonderful libraries that were left behind they discovered Arabic numbers and realised how useful they were, far better than the clunky Roman ones - for a start a small businessman could do addition just right there on the page, writing the digits from smallest to largest as they went - sadly as I said the monks screwed up and copied the digit order from the right to left written Arabic into western languages without doing the sane thing and reversing the digits so that they continued to be written smallest to largest (so that you could do addition without knowing how much space you needed for digits until you were done).
And so we're stuck with this silly artifact of history that has caused decades of arguing as we slowly rediscover the utility of putting the smaller digits first, as they were always meant to be
- nabla9 6y agoOne of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that without zero they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs.
- Taniwha 6y agothat plus there was no year 0, that surely started a series of events that eventually caused the fall of the Republic
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y agoThe Republic had already fallen by that time.
- fanf2 6y agoStrings are always big endian because the most significant bit comes first when you compare them lexicographically.
- Taniwha 6y agofew machines have full bit addressing, all modern GP machines I know of have byte pointers, not bit pointers. Some IBM systems do number the MSB bits of bytes as bit 0 - to confuse things they are nominally big/mixed endian
- johannes1234321 6y agoThat is for languages left-to-right. For Arabic and other right to left languages the story is different.
- nabla9 6y agoVisual ordering is not used much anymore. In the Unicode characters should be ordered logically (in the order they are interpreted) not visually. Then you use RLM or ALM to indicate right-to-left.