Perception of end. visually, most folks look at low addresses in storage as on the left hand and ascending to the right. Big Endian puts the most significant digits on the left and hence the lower address, puts the big end of the number at the lower end of storage.
There is also something about which end of a register the hardware starts it's arithmetic operations on, whether it operations on a right to left pattern for bit level operations or on a left to right pattern for bit level operations. -----Original Message----- From: Bernd Oppolzer [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, August 06, 2003 12:23 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: big and little endian What I never understood about this: how can big ENDian be explained ? Because, the number formats called big ENDian have the LEAST significant byte at the END, and the little ENDians have the MOST significant byte at the END. Can anybody explain ? Regards Bernd Am Mit, 06 Aug 2003 schrieben Sie: > Has to do with the order of bytes and significance. Whether, for > example, decimal 123456789 which is hex 0x75BCD15 is stored as 07 5B CD > 15 (big endian) or 15 CD 5B 07 (little endian). Intel is little endian. > > ~ Daniel > Confidentiality Warning: This e-mail contains information intended only for the use of the individual or entity named above. If the reader of this e-mail is not the intended recipient or the employee or agent responsible for delivering it to the intended recipient, any dissemination, publication or copying of this e-mail is strictly prohibited. The sender does not accept any responsibility for any loss, disruption or damage to your data or computer system that may occur while using data contained in, or transmitted with, this e-mail. If you have received this e-mail in error, please immediately notify us by return e-mail. Thank you.
