I think that it is obvious that Middle-Endianness is a satisfactory compromise between Big and Little Endian.
More seriously, it depends on what you want to do with the number. If you want to use it in a precise calculation, such as adding it to another number, you obviously want to process the least significant digits of the inputs first (which is what bit serial processors literally do).
If I want to know if a serially transmitted number is below or above a threshold, it would make sense to transmit it MSB first (with a fixed length).
Of course, using integers to count the number of people in India seems like using the wrong tool for the job to me altogether. Even if you were an omniscient ASI, this level of precision would require you to have clear standards at what time a human counts as born and at least provide a second-accurate timestamp or something. Few people care if the population in India was divisible by 17 at any fixed point in time, which is what we would mostly use integers for.
The natural type for the number of people in India (as opposed to the number of people in your bedroom) would be a floating point number.
And the correct way to specify a floating point number is to start with the exponent, which is the most important part. You will need to parse all of the bits of the exponent either way to get an idea of the magnitude of the number (unless we start encoding the exponent as a floating point number, again.)
The next most important thing is the sign bit. Then comes the mantissa, starting with the most significant bit.
So instead of writing
The electric charge of the electron is −1.602176634×10−19C.
What we should write is:
The electric charge of the electron is C×10−19×−1.602176634.
Standardizing for a shorter form (1.6e-19 C --> ??) is left as an exercise to the reader, as are questions about the benefits we get from switching to base-2 exponentials (base-e exponentials do not seem particularly handy, I kind of like using the same system of digits for both my floats and my ints) and omitting the then-redundant one in front of the dot of the mantissa.
I think that it is obvious that Middle-Endianness is a satisfactory compromise between Big and Little Endian.
More seriously, it depends on what you want to do with the number. If you want to use it in a precise calculation, such as adding it to another number, you obviously want to process the least significant digits of the inputs first (which is what bit serial processors literally do).
If I want to know if a serially transmitted number is below or above a threshold, it would make sense to transmit it MSB first (with a fixed length).
Of course, using integers to count the number of people in India seems like using the wrong tool for the job to me altogether. Even if you were an omniscient ASI, this level of precision would require you to have clear standards at what time a human counts as born and at least provide a second-accurate timestamp or something. Few people care if the population in India was divisible by 17 at any fixed point in time, which is what we would mostly use integers for.
The natural type for the number of people in India (as opposed to the number of people in your bedroom) would be a floating point number.
And the correct way to specify a floating point number is to start with the exponent, which is the most important part. You will need to parse all of the bits of the exponent either way to get an idea of the magnitude of the number (unless we start encoding the exponent as a floating point number, again.)
The next most important thing is the sign bit. Then comes the mantissa, starting with the most significant bit.
So instead of writing
What we should write is:
Standardizing for a shorter form (1.6e-19 C --> ??) is left as an exercise to the reader, as are questions about the benefits we get from switching to base-2 exponentials (base-e exponentials do not seem particularly handy, I kind of like using the same system of digits for both my floats and my ints) and omitting the then-redundant one in front of the dot of the mantissa.