[Tutor] little/big endian was Re: what is 'doubleword alignment'?

[Alan Gauld]

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! :-)

HTH,

Alan G.
Growing to hate my Netbook keyboard more by the day!
And hating my PC repairer even more!