While I have a strong personal preference for little endian, one thing I've always appreciated about IBM System/360 and its successors is that it at least has consistent notational conventions: most significant byte first, most significant bit zero[1][2].
That paper was obviously a product of motivated reasoning. And motivated reasoning in the hands of an intelligent and articulate person is always dangerous.
(Today, in the public sphere, we are seeing successful motivated reasoning by people who are much less intelligent and articulate, but that is a completely separate issue.)
The primary benefit (from observation of past arguments) that big-endian has is when you are dumping data and looking at a sequence of bytes, and don't want to mentally swap them around.
But that itself begs the question. If you are so keen on big-end first, then why does your dump start at the small end of memory?
Yes, if I hadn't known about that, I probably wouldn't have written "most."
> While I have a strong personal preference for little endian
Despite the porportedly even-handed treatment given in the seminal paper:
https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien137.txt
That paper was obviously a product of motivated reasoning. And motivated reasoning in the hands of an intelligent and articulate person is always dangerous.
(Today, in the public sphere, we are seeing successful motivated reasoning by people who are much less intelligent and articulate, but that is a completely separate issue.)
The primary benefit (from observation of past arguments) that big-endian has is when you are dumping data and looking at a sequence of bytes, and don't want to mentally swap them around.
But that itself begs the question. If you are so keen on big-end first, then why does your dump start at the small end of memory?