leastsignificantfirst

Leastsignificantfirst, or least significant first (LSF), is a convention for ordering the components of a numeric value or data sequence such that the least significant unit is placed at the beginning. In this order, the significance increases as you move later in the sequence.

In applications to numbers, sequences of digits or limbs are often stored or processed with the least significant element first. For example, representing 1234 as digits [4, 3, 2, 1] makes carry propagation straightforward when performing addition.

Endianness in computer memory is a related concept: little-endian systems store the least significant byte first, whereas big-endian systems store the most significant byte first. This affects how multi-byte values are interpreted when reading binary data across platforms.

LSF is also encountered in data encoding and serial communication where individual bits or bytes are transmitted in least significant first order; protocols specify the bit order to avoid misinterpretation.

In software libraries for big integers and cryptography, internal representations are often little-endian, facilitating arithmetic operations and algorithmic efficiency. When exchanging data or presenting numbers to humans, conversion to a more human-friendly most-significant-first form may be necessary.