Re: [Haskell-cafe] Endianess

On Tue 2008-05-13 20:46, Ketil Malde wrote:

Aaron Denney writes:

I guess it depends a lot on what you grew up with. The names (little/big endian) are incredibly apt.

The only argument I can come up with, is that big endian seems to make more sense for 'od':

% echo foobar > foo % od -x foo 0000000 6f66 626f 7261 000a 0000007

This, of course, is because `od -x' regards the input as 16-bit integers. We can get saner output if we regard it is 8-bit integers. $ od -t x1 foo 0000000 66 6f 6f 62 61 72 0a 0000007

...

Now I'm convinced that little endian is the way to go, as bit number n should have value 2^n, byte number n should have value 256^n, and so forth.

It's not that simple with bits. They lack consistency just like the usual US date format and the way Germans read numbers. Jed