Why the twist

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Floppy ribbons that support two floppy drives have a seven wire twist to differentiate between the A: and B: drive.

You can't name a floppy drive by any other name than A or B.
(what if you have more than two floppy drives then?)

In my book it shows the floppy drive connection to the twisted end as floppy drive A:
I suppose the picture could also show floppy B: at the twisted end (or could it, does the twisted end have to be A: )

As long as the twist distinguishes A: from B: (no matter which letter is assigned to the twist) this works.

But why the twist anyhow?

On a standard IDE cable, with say, a CD-ROM and HD attached, I presume the system knows which is, well because they're different types of devices, but also because of their logical addresses.
Two floppy drives are indeed the same type of device, but wouldn't they have different logical addresses to distinguish them, so why the physical feature of a twist.

I'll see what answers I get before I ask anything else.

 

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Flex, the floppy interface is much older than the IDE interface, and back then physical differences / switches were often used to determine settings, as 'auto detect' features were not really present / all that common

boards had hundreds of jumpers, modems had jumpers up the wazoo, its just legacy features from an ancient technology

modern OS' can often auto detect what is going to be A and B, although i cant say i have ever had more than 1 floppy in a PC, or the need for more