> Now, let's put that same decimal number into a 32-bit memory word on a little-endian machine. When asked what the four consecutive bytes are, why does the debugger not display "0x76, 0x54, 0x32, 0x10"? That's what would happen on a truly little-endian hardware system, as used by little-endian human thinkers, expecting a little-endian human display convention. Instead, it displays the weird hybrid "0x67, 0x45, 0x23, 0x01" version. Why aren't the humans who like little-endian not bothered by the fact that the human convention is not completely little-endian, and shows the two hex digits within each byte with a big-endian human display convention?

Because from a hardware architecture perspective, a single byte is a single digit. The order of the bits within that digit has no bearing upon the programmer. A debugger just converts the bits to a human readable format, be it decimal, hexadecimal or whatever. If you ask GDB nicely, it can print them out as decimal for you, through the "x/4db" command. You can also get it to show you the entire thing in big endian hex through "x/1xw". You're essentially complaining about the single-digit view using multiple digits for human readability.