Question

“Endian-ness” is an arbitrary choice of a machine architecture. Give an example or analogy of an arbitrary choice outside the field of computing – something that some people or organizations do in one way and other people or organizations do another way. Note: for the final exam, you do not need to know the byte order of big-endian or little-endian.

Answer 1

The analogy can be that some people write left to right and some people write right to the left.

Japanese is written top to the bottom right to left order whereas English is written in left to right order.

Another example could be that one organization prefers the top-down software development approach in taking decisions at a higher level and filter down on lower levels in the organization and in bottom-up approach components are developed and then integrated on upper levels.