endian

In other languages, the spoken version is little endian or big endian, and the written version aligns accordingly.

The thing is, little-endian won pretty much everywhere outside of network protocols, so almost all of the common data formats store words in little-endian format as a performance optimization.

One company managed to patent big endian byte ordering, so others decided to use little endian to avoid licensing it.

All you are pointing out is that mixing little-endian and big-endian may cause trouble.

There's little endian, big endian, and the US date format, which I like to call middle endian.

ARM cores, although technically bi-endian, are in practice little-endian.

In my apps I always used lattitude first, as was taught in geography lessons, but you've convinced me to move from lattitude endian to longitude endian.

Stick to bit significance and address order and everything is unambiguous and naturally inclined to little endian.

On a big-endian system, the high order byte of the timestamp would be modified, which would probably be too obvious.

It was an 8 byte field where the first four bytes were a little-endian integer of the Julian date (so Oct.

It is of course not ideal, but not nearly as much cause of confusion as the middle endian dates, because there's simply no way to know what 9/11/2001 means.

Thus, on big-endian machines, you're overwriting a zero (high order byte of a non-huge integer) with a zero, so no harm done, and the bug is masked.

The big argument was that if you converted things into big-endian form on the network, then a little-endian processor had to convert to send and convert to receive, but a big-endian processor got a free pass without "painful" conversion steps.

It's funny how the Germans and Dutch (rightfully) ridicule Americans for writing dates in middle-endian order like 9/11/2001, yet they say numbers with the decade flip "two and forty".

Later, rather than converting big endian to little endian people just convert to text (which has the same effect of a canonical form) but it hides the religious argument behind the "hey its just text, we all know how to parse text right?" sort of abstraction.

Not because of some technically proven deficiency in the idea of allowing big-endian machines, but because "we don't want to." I can only imagine if such logic had been applied to other parts of the Web.