854
Don't grow older than 255 or else it will overflow
(feddit.org)
A photo of a cake with 8 candles in a row. The first and fifth candle from the right are lit. The caption reads "Happy 17th Birthday"
I think you missed the point, that I was making, albeit poorly (little endian still requires leading zeros when not transmitting in a byte format, otherwise you don't know if the first on signal is for 1, 256, 1024, etc.) it's all good though
How would 3 leading zeros in a byte help coming to the conclusion that this is supposed to be 17?
I'm generally curious, sice theoretical informatics is already a good few years behind me :D
In a normal byte format it wouldn't help, the byte standard breaks off bits into 8 bit chunks and calls them bytes (I'm not trying to explain basics, just putting it there for background), little-endian excels at using the least number of bits to express larger numbers in a stream. If you wanted to send any number from 0-255 you only need 1 byte, for 256-512 you need two bytes (or 16 bits), in little-endian it can be represented in just 9 bits, or up to 1024 in 10 bits, etc.
Doesn't matter for much to many people, but when the number gets big enough you can save a lot of bandwidth.
Yeah, that digs up some long lost memories :D
Thanks