Big-endian is natural when you're comparing numbers, which is probably why people represent numbers in a big-endian fashion.
Little-endian is natural with casts because the address doesn't change, and it's the order in which addition takes place.
Little-endian is natural with casts because the address doesn't change, and it's the order in which addition takes place.
But more _natural_ is little endian because, well, it's just more straightforward to have the digits' magnitude be in ascending order (2^0, 2^1, 2^2, 2^3...) instead of putting it in reverse.
Plus you encounter less roadblocks in practice with little endian (e.g. address changes with casts) which is often a sign of good natural design
All human number systems I've ever seen write numbers out as big Endian (yes, even Roman numerals), so I'm really struggling to see how that wouldn't be considered natural.
But that's not what we're doing here, so it's not entirely relevant.
I wonder if we went big endian “by mistake” with Arabic numerals given that Arabic is written right to left.
Some ancient texts have “four and twenty” which is little endian.
We also add commas to large numbers to help with a human processing problem - you have to get to the end of the number to know what the first digit represents and then count backwards (groups of three help).