Well, to a computer running a program, it really doesn't care. But there are two cases where it DOES matter...Originally posted by: Loki726
I've never heard of any advantage that big endian has over little endian or vice versa. Could someone explain this in a little more detail?
Some software has be be written differently depending on if the architecture is big-endian or little endian. So having both makes writing portable code just a little bit harder. We should just pick one and stick with it.
Well, since we should only have one, which one to choose. Big-endian is just easier to look at in a memory dump. It would save me the mental effort of having to reverse things.
With that being said, the reason that little-endian exists in the first place is that if you are trying to manipulate a 16-bit address on a processor with an 8-bit CPU, it makes sense to store the least significant byte first, because that is what you need first. So, when Intel first made the 8086, it saved a few transistors.