Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2001 12:41:31 -0500 (EST) From: "Jasper O'Malley" <jooji@nickelkid.com> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: offtopic: c questions Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0110281232550.85366-100000@cornflake.nickelkid.com> In-Reply-To: <3BDB0680.E8714908@mindspring.com>
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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
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