Evan Martin (evan) wrote in evan_tech,
Evan Martin
evan
evan_tech

endianness

I always get big-endian and little-endian confused. I can always remember that x86 and network are opposites, and that x86 uses the "broken" one, but I can never remember which is which.

Here's a note that may help you remember:

European-style dates, of the form dd/mm/yyyy, are little-endian. Little-endian breaks naive date sorting: 01012004 is greater than 02012005. So if you can just build an association between "European" and "little", the rest follows from there: European dates → broken sorting → broken architecture → x86.

(US-style dates are middle-endian, and we'd all do better to eliminate them. It's too easy to confuse them with little-endian dates if we switched that way, so why not use big-endian dates? I do whenever sorting matters, like in file names.)
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  • 28 comments

  • blog moved

    As described elsewhere, I've quit LiveJournal. If you're interested in my continuing posts, you should look at one of these (each contains feed…

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    They published a paper on Dremel, my favorite previously-unpublished tool from the Google toolchest. Greg Linden discusses it: "[...] it is capable…

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