On Wednesday 21 November 2001 16:59, David Chart wrote: > --On 21/11/01 21:55 +0000 F J Franklin wrote: > > o latin, as spoken by Italian Renaissance mathematician Francesco > > Maurolico (1494-1575) - dictionary hash file for big-endian > > architecture (ln-IT) > > Oh, that is just so cool... I have to get that installed on my system. (I'm > on PPC, so I think I'm big-endian, right? BTW, apart from being a Swift > reference, what does that mean?)
It means that numbers are written with the big end first - 0x9e3779b9 is stored as 9e 37 79 b9, with 9e at the lowest address. Little endian stores it as b9 79 37 9e. Little-endianness is built into the human body, so we have a tendency to use it even though big-endian may seem to make more sense. If lobsters had invented computers, there would be no little-endians. Any idea what "high-heel" and "low-heel" mean as applied to computers? phma
