Endian-ness Gives Me a Headache

[jamesq]

Writing functions that do bit-wise operations on multiple words derived from a text steam is a huge headache when it has to work, and give identical results on Big-endian and Little-endian machines.

Fie on the House of Lilliput (Intel) and Blefuscu (IBM).

Comments

[garething.livejournal.com]

Are you speaking in tongues? I see words, but there is no meaning... What are you talking about?

[jamesq]

I'll use dates as an analogy. A big-endian date puts the largest part first, so the date would be MM-DD. A little-endian date puts the smallest part first, so a date would be DD-MM.

If you're talking to someone who uses the other convention, things can get confusing. I say Estrella next year begins on 02-08 - meaning February 8th - but if you don't know the convention you think it's August 2nd.

The terminology is derived from Swift's Gulliver's Travels. The Lilliputians were in the midst of a holy war with Blefuscu because the former cracked open their hard-boiled eggs on the little end and the latter on the big end.

[conejita-diabla.livejournal.com]

omg....flashback...ow.

[jamesq]

To be honest it was an hour of WTF is wrong with my data, followed by five minutes of Aha, I have to reorder the bytes.

[conejita-diabla.livejournal.com]

lol...