big-endian

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There was that discussion a while ago on whether dates should be expressed in big-endian or little-endian format. -- Adam

Users will notice when they try to move data from a computer of opposite endianness and they find that its garbage because the designers of the format forgot to allow determination of the data's endianness. --Jay

http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/big-endian.html


Big-endian dates have the places in the order year;month;day;hour;minute;second. Places on the right which are too specific are elided. Places on the left which should be assumed from context (as the year and month are when you say "on the 12th") are changed to "no'o" for absolute clarity, or in common usage just dropped, with the pi'es left to mark the place.

  • Generically, "big-endian" means "with the largest unit first". Ordinary numbers like 123 are big-endian: 1 hundreds, 2 tens, 3 units.

Contrast with little-endian and middle-endian.