Big-Endian and Little-Endian

Wikipedia has a very clear graph and tells me that "big-endian" and "little-endian" comes from Gulliver’s Travels

1. Big-Endian, Little-Endian is not only for bit level, but most likely people talk about it on byte level. The network (big-endian) and host (any) conversion is quite popular on Internet. 

2. Some terms

a) Most-Significant-Byte (MSB): High byte

b) Lest-Significant-Byte (LSB): Low byte

c) Bit Endianness or Bit-level Endianness: very rare used

3. Little Endian is more popular: Windows, Linux on x86/64, BSD/FreeBSD on X86/64, iOS on ARM, MAC OS on x86/64

4. POSIX has defined some functions to do the network/host converting: ntohl(), ntohs(), htonl(), htons() in arpa/inet.h

 

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