[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!