Where did endianness come from [duplicate]

This question already has answers her开发者_Python百科e: Closed 11 years ago.

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Why are both little- and big-endian in use?

I am just wondering what is the history of endianness? I would have thought that the way that binary data was stored at lowest level would have long become standard yet clearly it has not. Why?

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The term actually came from Gulliver's Travels, but was adopted to summarise the seemingly arbitrary difference in number representation in computers:

The origin of the odd terms big endian and little endian can be traced to the 1726 book Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift. In one part of the story, resistance to an imperial edict to break soft-boiled eggs on the "little end" escalates to civil war. (The plot is a satire of England's King Henry VIII's break with the Catholic Church.) A few hundred years later, in 1981, Danny Cohen applied the terms and the satire to our current situation in IEEE Computer (vol. 14, no. 10).

http://www.netrino.com/node/149

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I would start here. It has to do with optimization it seems. Some calculations are easier with big-endian, while others are easier with little-endian.

Little-endian

The little-endian system has the property that the same value can be read from memory at different lengths without using different addresses

Big-endian

On the other hand, in some situations it may be useful to obtain an approximation of a multi-byte or multi-word value by reading only its most-significant portion instead of the complete representation; a big-endian processor may read such an approximation using the same base-address that would be used for the full value.

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You might just as well ask why every single protein in existance is built up from L-aminoacids instead of the perfectly similar (but mirrored) D-aminoacids. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amino_acid#Isomerism

Some things just happen for no reason at all and then stick due to backwards compatibility.