On 07/19/2011 05:43 PM, Alan Gauld wrote:
Albert-Jan Roskam wrote:
> and ctypes to process the data in python. It works now, although I
> still want to read more about this. Where does the distinction
> little/big endian enter this story?
That's to do with which bit in a byte/word is most significant.
e.g. is the decimal value 1 stored as
00000001 # the one on the right hand nibble
or as
00010000 # the one on the left hand nibble
Now scale that up to word sized numbers...
Different CPUs do it differently.
I can't recall which is which - I'm sure wikipedia will
reveal all! :-)
Little-endian is the method used by the Intel processor (such as the
Pentium). Big-endian is the system used by most network protocols, as
well as the 68000 and many other processors.
For our purposes, it's the ordering of the bytes within a 16 or 32 bit
number. Little-endian puts the least significant byte first, while
big-endian puts the most significant byte first.
--
DaveA
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