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Comment by fyolnish | Hacker News Reader

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fyolnish·

"Intel stores bytes "little endian," meaning lower significant bytes are stored in lower memory addresses."

I would like to meet the person that doesn't know what endianness is, but can still understand that explanation.

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It's an okay refresher for those who forget which way is which.

I agree that prose was not the right way to communicate this; BE & LE are much easier to explain via example (1 -> 00:00:00:01 or 01:00:00:00).

Except that now the reader has to understand what you mean with your xx:xx:xx:xx syntax. Having examples is good, but then you should provide a small graphic with boxes representing bytes in memory and associated numbers indicating memory addresses. And once you do that, you've actually just provided a visual illustration of exactly what the quote says: least significant byte at lowest memory address vs. highest memory address.

It's even worse trying to explain Gulliver's Travels (and the origin of Endianness) to engineers that do know it in the data-storage sense.

Please try. I've no idea what you're talking about.

Jonathon Swift's "Gulliver's Travels", a satire of 18th century England, included in it a long-running bloody war between two religious sects that started over the correct way to eat a soft-boiled egg: the big end, or the little end.

For those not familiar with the history of England, the tome of Western literature (and the genre of satire), or soft-boiled eggs, I've gotten some confused looks when trying to explain this origin. Plus, it doesn't really add anything at all to the understand of endianness in the computer hardware sense.

Speaking of which I think this is one of my fav papers to read from an historical computing pov:

ON HOLY WARS AND A PLEA FOR PEACE - Danny Cohen 1 April 1980 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/ien/ien137.txt

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