Except that it's often convenient for encodings to sort lexographically and numerically the same way. There are several multi-precision number formats with thi

Except that it's often convenient for encodings to sort lexographically and numerically the same way. There are several multi-precision number formats with this property, but they're all either equally slow to load on any endian machine, or faster to load on big-endian machines. Also, on a 64-bit big-endian architecture, you don't need specialized string comparison instructions to get efficient string comparisons. The code is only slightly more complicated on BE architectures that only support aligned 64-bit loads.