Endianness

Rare card · No. 35012

In computing, endianness is the order in which bytes within a word data type are transmitted over a data communication medium or addressed in computer memory, counting only byte significance. Endianness is primarily expressed as big-endian (BE) or little-endian (LE). Computers store information in various-sized groups of binary bits. Each group is assigned a number, called its address, that the computer uses to access that data. On most modern computers, the smallest data group with an address is eight bits long and is called a byte. Larger groups comprise two or more bytes; for example, a word often contains 32 bits or 64 bits. There are two principal ways a computer could number the individual bytes in a larger group, starting at either end. A big-endian system stores the most significant byte of a word at the smallest memory address and the least significant byte at the largest. A little-endian system, in contrast, stores the least-significant byte at the smallest address. Of the two...

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