Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, this might be irrelevant at the cpu level, but within a byte, bits are usually displayed most significant bit first, so with little endian you end up with bit order: 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 instead of 15 to 0 This is because little endian is not how humans write numbers. For consistency with little endianness we would have to switch to writing "one hundred and twenty three" as 321
It might not be how humans write numbers but it is consistent with how we think about numbers in a base system. 123 = 3x10^0 + 2x10^1 + 1x10^2 So if you were to go and label each digit in 123 with the power of 10 it represents, you end up with little endian ordering (eg the 3 has index 0 and the 1 has index 2). This is why little endian has always made more sense to me, personally.
Re: The Byte Order Fiasco
#161I don't know, when we write in general, we tend to write the most significant stuff first so you lose less information if you stop early. Even numbers we truncate twelve millions instead of something like twelve millions, zero thousand zero hundreds and 0.