History
The problem of dealing with data in different representations is sometimes termed the NUXI problem. This terminology alludes to the issue that a value represented by the byte-string "UNIX" on a big-endian system may be stored as "NUXI" on a PDP-11 middle-endian system; UNIX was one of the first systems to allow the same code to run on, and transfer data between, platforms with different internal representations.
An often-cited argument in favor of big-endian is that it is consistent with the ordering commonly used in natural languages. Spoken languages have a wide variety of organizations of numbers: the decimal number 92 is spoken in English as ninety-two, in German and Dutch as two and ninety and in French as eighty-twelve (or, to be precise, as four-twenties twelve) with a similar system in Danish (two-and-ninety). However, numbers are written almost universally in the Hindu-Arabic numeral system, in which the most significant digits are written first in languages written left-to-right, and last in languages written right-to-left.
Read more about this topic: Htonl
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of all countries shows that the working class exclusively by its own effort is able to develop only trade-union consciousness.”
—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“Tell me of the height of the mountains of the moon, or of the diameter of space, and I may believe you, but of the secret history of the Almighty, and I shall pronounce thee mad.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)