Comment by amluto
6 hours ago
> Little endian is superior because you can cast between integer types without pointer arithmetic
I’ve heard this one several times and it never really made sense. Is the argument that y you can do:
short s;
long *p = (long*)&s;
Or vice versa and it kind of works under some circumstances?
Yes. In little-endian, the difference between short and long at a specific address is how many bytes you read from that address. In big-endian, to cast a long to a short, you have to jump forward 6 bytes to get to the 2 least-significant bytes.
Wow, I've been living life assuming that little endian was just the VHS of byte orders with no redeeming qualities whatsoever until today. This actually makes sense, thank you!