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Tag Archive for endianness

Has Little Endian won?

When teaching recently about the Big vs. Little Endian battle, a student asked whether it had been settled, and I realized I didn’t know. Looking at the Wikipedia article, it seems that the most popular current OS/architecture pairs use Little Endian but that Internet Protocol specifies Big Endian for transferring numeric values in packet headers. Would that be a good summary of the current status? Do current network cards or CPUs provide hardware support for switching byte order?

Little and Big endian confusion

Just to make sure if I understand this correctly. Is this right that little endian processors read the memory addresses from highest to the lowest address and where as a big endian processors suppose to read them from lowest to the highest address?