1. Suppose we need to transfer data between various machines which are a mixture of big endian and little endian architectures. To avoid the conversion problem of the the endian-ness of the number, we decide to simply transfer numbers using their character representations.
For example, for the number 128, instead of worrying about whether to send the big-endian 32 bit stream of 0x00000080 or the little endian 0x80000000, we simply send three bytes: the 8 bit codes for the '1' character, the '2' character, and then the '8' character.
What could be some disadvantages of this approach?