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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 |
User-agent: |
KMail/1.8.50 |
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?