Our civil notation is big-endian but of course mental arithmetic is little-endian: to compute 456 + 789 the mental exercise is 6 + 9 = 15, write down the 5, 1 + 5 + 8 = 14, ...
I don't know the answer to your question. The S/360 was the first computer I learned at the hardware level, so big-endian just seemed like the natural way to do things. After I worked some on Intel I started to "get" the benefits of little-endian. One thing about little-endian I have observed of relevance to software writers: if I expect you to pass me a halfword and instead you pass me a fullword, then the code will probably work most of the time. Whether that is a benefit or a liability depends upon one's point of view. Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of John McKown Sent: Wednesday, March 8, 2017 8:12 AM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: curious: why S/360 & decendants are "big endian". This is more a Friday type topic. But I'm curious about why the original designers of the S/360 went with "big endian" instead of "small endian"? The _only_ reason that I can think of is because our arithmetic "system" is "big endian". The more I think about it, the more Intel's "little endian" architecture makes more sense. I also wish the same were true of our writing (e.g. one hundred would be written 001, not 100). This latter would actually make outputting formatted numbers easier to program. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
