> for, eg, sparcs it makes no difference.  for intel it does.  im(ns)ho, it
> | should *always* be in network byte order since that's the ordering my
> | brain uses.
> 
> Umm, no. We should not choose which ordering simply to be compatible
> with _your_ brain ;-)
> 
> More seriously, though, I think this is terribly wrong. The same ordering
> as od -b uses would seem best.

Some wag once suggested (or was it actually implemented somewhere?) that
debuggers on little-endian processors should list the ASCII on the left, the
address in the middle, and the bytes on the right, in reverse order.  That
way, you could easily read both the ASCII strings and the multi-byte numeric
fields:

ABCD EFGH  00001000  48 47 46 45  44 43 42 41
JKLM NOPQ  00001008  4F 4E 4D 4C  4B 4A 49 48

Regards,

David Querbach
Real-Time Systems Inc.