4 ms·

"Little-endian" and "big-endian" aren't completely meaningless - they originally came from a description of the history/war between two nations in Gulliver's Tr

• bregma 5y ago
  Shaka, when the walls fell.
• squabble 5y ago
  In my opinion, these are bad names and we would all have saved a lot of brain power if simple and clearly meaningful names were chosen. The cultural reference in the names preserves the opinion that the choice of byte order is not worth fighting about. But this is an extra piece of information that's not needed. Moreover, the choice of the word "end" is unfortunate, since it means both "boundary" (as in the 2 ends of an egg) and "conclusion" (as in the end of a transmission). To make matters worse, they chose to have "little endian" refer to the case where the big (most significant) byte is at the end of a transmission. Better names might be something like "smallest-first byte order". Edit: If you are confused, think of it this way: Little-endian = little end first Big-endian = big end first
  • menage 5y ago
    Agreed, they're not the clearest of names, particularly in a global cultural context. But they're not totally arbitrary like "type 1 error" and "type 2 error".
    • zestyping 5y ago
      The thing that this article seemed to be getting at was not just whether the names have meaning — I interpreted it to be specifically about whether two names are easily swappable. It's a dichotomy, but which way does it go? "Little-endian" is the perfect example: it clearly has something to do with little and big, but it's impossible to tell from the words which one means LSB-first and which one means MSB-first.
• userbinator 5y ago
  Little endian: Least significant byte at Lowest address. It's definitely not meaningless. I also tend to think of it as the Logical one (the significance grows with the address.) All that alliteration aids acceptance and allows accurate agreement.
  • tjoff 5y ago
    Oh, so naturally big endian is most significant byte at largest address?
    • zestyping 5y ago
      Heads I win, tails you lose.
  • kayodelycaon 5y ago
    “endian” … end is the last part of something. It would imply that big/little is describing the last address, not the first. When it comes to how to store numbers, in English, we read the highest value from the right to the lowest value on the left. Your “logical” is counter to how English-speaking people write numbers.
    • OrderlyTiamat 5y ago
      > When it comes to how to store numbers, in English, we read the highest value from the right to the lowest value on the left. Huh? When I read 24, "twentyfour", the highest value is on the left, followed by less high values on the right, and spoken in that order. It's actually different in other languages, in dutch for example I would say "vierEnTwintig", or "four and twenty" translated directly, so saying the least high value first. (... However this is only for the two digits, because upwards we'll say "honderdVierEnTwintig", or "hunderd four and twenty")
      • kayodelycaon 5y ago
        I mixed up right and left.
• tinus_hn 5y ago
  It is very clearly a reference to this story about a societal schism arising from a meaningless choice. But it doesn’t really make it clear which is which. You say clearly little endian means you start with the little part. But why couldn’t it be that little endian means the end is the little part? Endian is not a word that means anything apart from the Gulliver’s Travels story or the order of bytes.