From owner-freebsd-chat Sun Oct 28 9:41:35 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from cornflake.nickelkid.com (cornflake.nickelkid.com [216.116.135.26]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4ED3137B406 for ; Sun, 28 Oct 2001 09:41:33 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (jooji@localhost) by cornflake.nickelkid.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id MAA85454; Sun, 28 Oct 2001 12:41:32 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from jooji@cornflake.nickelkid.com) Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2001 12:41:31 -0500 (EST) From: "Jasper O'Malley" To: Terry Lambert Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: offtopic: c questions In-Reply-To: <3BDB0680.E8714908@mindspring.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Sat, 27 Oct 2001, Terry Lambert wrote: > It is a corruption of whether you put "the big end in to > the pipe first, or the little end in", combined with a > joke on the English similarity in pronunciation between > the word pair "end in" and the word "Indian" -- hence the > use of the "a" in the contration: "endian" instead of > "endin". I always figured it was just turning a noun into an adjective by slapping an "-ian" onto the noun, so that computing architectures that use the "big end" ordering are "bigendian." Other examples of the word construction are "reptilian" (from "reptile") and "Jeffersonian" (from "Jefferson"). Cheers, Mick To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message