Endianness: The Byte Order You Didn't Know You Needed to Know
Most engineers writing high-level software don't even care, but if you are engaged in low-level debugging at the hardware level, you definitely need to be aware of the the data "endianness" and how to handle it.
Endianness refers to the order in which bytes are stored in computer memory. There are two main flavors:
- Big-Endian: The most significant byte (MSB) is stored at the lowest memory address. Think of it like reading a number from left to right – the "big end" comes first.
- Little-Endian: The least significant byte (LSB) is stored at the lowest memory address. This is more like how we'd write numbers on paper if we were to put the units digit first.
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