[amluto]

> Little endian is superior because you can cast between integer types without pointer arithmetic

I’ve heard this one several times and it never really made sense. Is the argument that y you can do:

    short s;
    long *p = (long*)&s;

Or vice versa and it kind of works under some circumstances?

[elehack]

Yes. In little-endian, the difference between short and long at a specific address is how many bytes you read from that address. In big-endian, to cast a long to a short, you have to jump forward 6 bytes to get to the 2 least-significant bytes.

[lxgr]

Wow, I've been living life assuming that little endian was just the VHS of byte orders with no redeeming qualities whatsoever until today. This actually makes sense, thank you!