Human Beings Are Big-Endian

I always have trouble remembering the difference between big-endian and little-endian.  The names don’t make any sense, so it ends up being a mere definition – and I have trouble with arbitrary definitions.  In the past, after figuring it out, I have noted to myself that human beings are big-endian as a memory-aid.  That is, we put our most-significant digits on the left.  And that’s great to remember, except then I forgot which endianness we were.

I guess I need a memory-aid for my memory-aid.

So this is a note to my future self: Human beings are big-endian.  Well, at least English-speaking, Arabic-numeral-using, base-ten-counting human beings who assume that linear memory addresses increase as you go from left-to-right.  Those assumptions seem good enough for me, though.