Does anyone happen to know what the arguments for big-endianness versus little-endianness in the Unicode format were?
I've never really understood the advantage of one over the other, but this section on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Optimization helps explain that there are optimizations that can be made at a hardware level when performing arithmetic on little-endianness values.
If you're using, say, UCS2 (not UTF16, lest we get too confused), it's awfully nice if the wide character (i.e. a C short) for "A" can be equal to the literal 'A' and not 0x4100. Making that work depends on the endianness of the host architecture, not just the data.
I've never really understood the advantage of one over the other, but this section on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Optimization helps explain that there are optimizations that can be made at a hardware level when performing arithmetic on little-endianness values.
Is the argument for using LE in Unicode similar?