5.20. Determining the Architecture’s Byte Order
It is an interesting fact of the computing world that we cannot all agree on the order in which binary data ought to be stored. Is the most significant bit stored at the higher-numbered address or the lower? When we shove a message over a wire, do we send the most significant bit first, or the least significant?
Believe it or not, it’s not entirely arbitrary. There are good arguments on both sides (which we will not delve into here).
For more than twenty years, the terms little-endian and big-endian have been applied to the two extreme opposites. These apparently were first used by Danny Cohen; refer to his classic article “On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace” (IEEE Computer, October 1981). The actual ...
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