PDP-11 was very common in its time, and used the 'BADC' byte order.

I thought wikipedia would have that tidbit, but apparently not. [softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/215535|This]#1 seems to have a good answer. Anyway, one benefit of the little-endian architecture is that it can help you with pointer addressing. One may cast an int pointer to unsigned char pointer, and use that to inspect the "character value" of a small int. Zero offset ie no index uses the simpler addressing mode and may yield more compact machine code.

Little-endian is conceptually similar to positional number system, where the number base is exponentiated by index. Index 0 for the smallest digit and so on. (In big-endian, the offset is offset by the operand width. Buffalo buffalo buffalo;)

#1. Linking to stackexchange is prohibited?

In reply to Re^5: Understanding endianness of a number by Anonymous Monk
in thread Understanding endianness of a number by stevieb

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