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Endianness

  • The term big-endian is expressed in little-endian
  • The term little-endian is also expressed in little-endian

In computing, endianness is the order or sequence of bytes of a word of digital data in computer memory. Endianness is primarily expressed as big-endian (BE) or little-endian (LE). A big-endian system stores the most significant byte of a word at the smallest memory address and the least significant byte at the largest. A little-endian system, in contrast, stores the least-significant byte at the smallest address.

Endianness - Wikipedia

big-endian (Mike's preference):

I describe this as "the wagging tail of the dog on the right". The thing that changes least in a set of things will group them when ordering alphabetically. This is useful when listing files (or any string) by name and helps with tab completion.

  • Filenames: e.g. 2022-08-24-example-file.txt # Sorting by filename sorts by date
  • Command line tool names (file/function): e.g. instance-terminate # noun-verb naming allows for tab completion for actions that can be performed on an object

ISO 8601 expresses dates/times in big endian formats.