On Wed, 8 Mar 2017 10:11:44 -0600, John McKown <[email protected]> wrote:
>This is more a Friday type topic. But I'm curious about why the original >designers of the S/360 went with "big endian" instead of "small endian"? >The _only_ reason that I can think of is because our arithmetic "system" is >"big endian". The more I think about it, the more Intel's "little endian" >architecture makes more sense. I also wish the same were true of our >writing (e.g. one hundred would be written 001, not 100). This latter would >actually make outputting formatted numbers easier to program. > No idea why S/360 folks did it this way but among the natural languages there is at least one, likely more, where they do like you desire. In Arabic while writing from right to left 345 is written exactly in that order and it's read "five forty three hundred". >Oh, well, feel free to ignore this musing of mine. > >-- >"Irrigation of the land with seawater desalinated by fusion power is >ancient. It's called 'rain'." -- Michael McClary, in alt.fusion > >Maranatha! <>< >John McKown > MKK ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
