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Re: [avr-chat] What's 'little endian'


From: Rolf Magnus
Subject: Re: [avr-chat] What's 'little endian'
Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2005 01:31:16 +0200
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On Tuesday 09 August 2005 19:59, Alan Kilian wrote:
> > what's 'little endian'?
>
>     Royce,
>
>       Imagine you have a processor that can read and write individual
>       bytes of data to memory. (For example. It happens in other
>       areas also.)
>
>       When it wants to store a 2-byte integer (for example) to
>       memory, it needs to decide which byte of the integer gets stored
>       where in memory.
>
>       It could store the most-significant byte at the lower address
>       and follow it with the least-significant byte, or it could do it
>       the other way around. (Otherwise known as the correct way  ;-))
>
>       http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/b/big_endian.html

What I've always been wondering about is why the names are mixed up. From that 
page: "In a little-endian system, the least significant value in the sequence 
is stored first." Why is it called little-_endian_ if the integers _start_ 
with the "little" byte?




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