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Why did some processor manifacturers decide to use
?
I’ve heard that with big endian one can find out faster, if a number is negative or positive, because that bit is the first one. (This doesn’t matter on modern CPUs, as individual bit can’t be accessed anymore.)
The benefit of little endianness is that a variable can be read as any length using the same address.
For example a 32 bit variable can be read as an 8 bit or 16 bit variable without changing the address. This may have limited benefit these days, but in the days of assembler and limited memory it could be a significant advantage