Big-Endian vs. Little-Endian

Given a choice, I prefer big-endian in isolation.

In this situation, why bother with it, since it is hard to imagine situations in which this really matters. In the unlikely situation that the order might be important in a special situation, I would suggest using the endianess in which your team has worked previously. This may help to avoid one or two errors during a large project.

Although the current specifications do not require any binary interfacing to the outside world, there is always a risk that in a future version such connections are needed. In these situations, remember to write the actual code that work with any endianess (e.g. explicitly using shifts, ORs and masks) to assemble and/or disassemble a string of bytes.

Paul

There is a slight advantage in little-endian: you can address the least significant part of a longer item with the same address as the original item.

In Intel 80x86 family, the lowest byte of a longword is in the same address as the longword, which most often is intuitively clear. This does not work in big-endian architectures.

Tauno Voipio tauno voipio (at) iki fi

But the hex dumps are harder to read! ;)

Hex dumps are things of the 80s. However, I prefer little endian because of reasons previous stated except in communication applications where data normally comes over the wire in big endian format AND the CPU has a word length greater than 8 bits. Using big endian in communication applications avoids having to swap all the data.

Peter Nachtwey

How sweet ... a newbie. ;-)

-- Michael N. Moran (h) 770 516 7918

"... abstractions save us time working, but they don't save us time learning." Joel Spolsky, The Law of Leaky Abstractions

The Beatles were wrong: 1 & 1 & 1 is 1

An old discussion on this subject:

Exactly! I recently switched from a long line of little-endian processors to the big-endian Coldfire. I spent too many years reading byte-oriented hex dumps and trying to reorder the bytes in my head.

You just keep telling yourself that ....

Casey

OTOH big-endian has the advantage of immediate access to the sign bit, and the penalty of requiring an initial address calculation for most arithmetic operations.

And?

It may be intuitively clear, but for what purpose? How often do you wish to address the LSbyte of a multi-byte value?

...and the 60's, the 70's, the 90's, and the 00's...

-- Dan Henry

Use a proper dump program that dumps bytes from right to left as the VAX/VMS DUMP command did (since 1970's).

Paul

Everett M. Greene ??:

network packets' header use the bigedian, but no need to call converting fuctions to convert the value in packet header if use bigedian machine

BZ

I do it all of the time, but I don't see having it at the same address as the longword as being any intuitively clearer. In fact, I find the opposite to be slightly more intuitive.

How about 4-bit processors? I am sure that I am not the only one here who like them... Any opinions about Big-Endian vs. Little-Endian when using multiple nybbles to make bytes?

Strange, I thought I was looking at one a few days ago :)

Al

Just curious: would I be correct in assuming you are a "software person" as opposed to a "hardware/software person"?

Mike Harding

But you then have to dump the locations a second time if you want to see the binary values in their memory order without playing mental calesthentics.

Without further comment:

Processor is [80286]

-d 100 120

-dw 100 120

-da 100 120

-dd 100 120

-q

Usually the processor manufacturer made the choice for you by implementing the instruction set. Even for 8bit machines.

Rene

-- > At the risk of starting a flame war, which choice have people