EndIan.net
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endian.net: Main
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What's an endian?
The terms big endian and little endian were originally borrowed from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (dean of St Patrick´s Cathedral in Dublin btw), but are now used in computer science.
A computer's endian-ness defines in what way it stores data internally. Some processors store data with the high byte first (Big Endian), while others put it last (Little Endian). Some seem to mix and match (Middle Endian) while others still can switch between different endian-modes (Bi Endian). Ok, now I have probably confused you enough. Let's look at what the dictionaries say.
Techweb's dictionary defines Big Endian this way:
'The order of bytes in a word in which the most significant byte or digits are placed leftmost in the structure. This is the way humans deal with normal arithmetic. However, some CPUs are built using the little endian method, which is just the opposite and places the least significant digits on the left. Since numbers are calculated by the CPU starting with the least significant digits, little endian numbers are already set up for the required processing order.
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