🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <16294@auspex-gw.auspex.com> wally@Auspex.COM (Wally Bass) writes:
|   Actually, I think that it's not the 'load' problem so much as it is
|   the 'add' problem. When you are going to do an add on a machine with
|   1 byte adder, you want the low order bytes of both operands first,
|   and the high order bytes last, because that is the direction in
|   which the carry propagates.

One can make an equivalent argument for the 'compare' problem. When
you are going to do a compare on a machine with a 1 byte comparator,
you want the high order bytes of both operands first, and the low
order bytes last, because you can stop working sooner. One can even
point out when sorting records that storing your numbers in big-endian
format means you only need to know the offset and length of the key
fields, not whether they are alpha or numeric.

I believe that whether bytes were big-endian or little-endian was
largely an arbitrary decision when the oldest ancestor of the ISA was
being designed, based on reasons that made sense at the time but which
may now be completely lost in the mist. All we can do now is deal with
the results of the fact that about half the ISAs are "wrong" :-)