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

[Reza Naima]

as a side note (not sure if it's on the web page or not, havn't looked),
the origins of this term have to do with the book/story of gulliver's
travels.  the war was fought because two nations couldn't decide which
end of a hard boiled egg to break open - the big end, or the little end.

- reza "master of all that is trivia" naima

On Wed, Aug 10, 2005 at 01:31:16AM +0200, Rolf Magnus sent me this...
> 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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