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From: fouts@orville (Marty Fouts)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.m68k
Subject: Re: Intel vs Motorola Byte ordering
Message-ID: <49@ames.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 4-Dec-86 13:01:32 EST
Article-I.D.: ames.49
Posted: Thu Dec  4 13:01:32 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 5-Dec-86 02:50:45 EST
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Reply-To: fouts@orville.UUCP (Marty Fouts)
Organization: NASA Ames Research Center, Mountain View, CA
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A number of people have made claims along the line
that BIG ENDIAN is "easier to read because it's" like English.  This is
perhaps an oversimplification.  You can write a memory dump program to
present data in whichever format most amuses you, and I have seen terrible
examples of several possible formats, my favorite being the one which
gives lines of hex bytes alongside of lines of the ascii character codes
for the same memory addresses with the hex reading right to left and the
ascii reading left to right, like:

20 6e 69 74 72 61 4d 20  Martin 
20 20 20 73 74 74 6f 46 Fouts

Obviously, any of the four combinations LL, LR, RL, RR could have been coded,
independent of the wordsize and byte ordering of the machine in question.
Three of the four would be hard to read compared to the fourth, depending on
who you are.

I don't believe that there is an overriding hardware or software architural
requirement that makes one byte ordering obviously right.  There are
application and implementation dependent factors favoring either, depending
on the circumstance.  (And of course, there is always the 60 bit word length
machine :-)

A standard would be nice, but its probably too late for that.  (Anybody care
to discuss the superiority of EBCDIC over ASCII?)  I guess we should just be
happy that there aren't more byte within word order choices being made.