Manfredi, Albert E wrote: [..]
I guess we'll just have to go with "Internet convention" arguments.
Well we can also go the Wikipedia route: 8<---------------Networks generally use big-endian numbers as addresses; this is historically because this allowed the routing to be decided as a telephone number was dialed. Motorola processors have generally used big-endian numbers, and ARM processors gained truly switchable endianness in order to improve performance of networking devices based on them.
---------------->8 and more importantly: 8<------------------The Internet Protocol defines a standard "big-endian" network byte order. This byte order is used for all numeric values in the packet headers and by many higher level protocols and file formats that are designed for use over IP.
-------------------->8 convincing is also: 8<-------------------The Berkeley sockets API defines a set of functions to convert 16- and 32-bit integers to and from network byte order: the htonl and htons functions convert 32-bit ("long") and 16-bit ("short") values respectively from host to network order; whereas the ntohl and ntohs functions convert from network to host order.
-------------------->8If Internet Protocols where not usually/always in Big Endian format, then those functions would not have existed.
Greets, Jeroen
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