title: What is the reason to store IPv6 as big endian
body: <p>I am having a doubt about how to store IPv6 addresses on my system. On my system I accept a packet from the network run statistics on it and send it forward.</p>
  
  <p>I have read the that common way to store it is in big-endian(network order) regardless of the endianness of the CPU. Although several colleagues of mine said they also familiar with this notation no one including google couldn't give a concrete explanation of <strong>why</strong> its the customary tradition.</p>
  
  <p>The way I see it, the data will be accessed many times in the system so isn't it simpler to change it to host-order(on my case its little-endian) and use it on the entire system without having to run <em>ntoh</em> calls each time I want to run some arithmetic operation on it, and simply change it to network-order if I want to use this address on a packet I want to send back on the network?</p>