Earlier quoted context omitted.
AT&T really is annoying but it feels like the big vs little endian debate. Fairly easy to convert between the two as well.
For those who don't know, that's why big and little endian were called that, because the debate was so frivolous. It's a reference to the book Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift in which an island folk was split about from which end you should crack a boiled egg. (I'm a big endian for example).
-123 -12 -1
Here are three numbers. If we read them from left to right, they all begin with 1, but we cant tell what the 1 means, in one case it means 100, in one it means 10 and in one it means 1. We need to parse the entire number to know what the first number means. If we parse from right to left, each number always means the same thing. the first is how many once, the second how many 10s and so on.
So it makes sense to store the smallest first. In a big endian architecture, if i want to read an 8, 16, 32 or 64 bit word each byte will always mean the same, if we pad out the type with zeros. So little endian is right, and Arabic numerals are wrong.