Endianness
adjective - denoting or relating to a system of ordering bytes in a word, or bits in a byte, in which the most significant (or least significant) item is put first.
Endianness
Little Endian Format - LSB is stored first
In little endian machines, last byte of binary representation of the multibyte data-type is stored first.
Big Endian Format - MSB is stored first
In big endian machines, first byte of binary representation of the multibyte data-type is stored first.
Middle Endian Format
Bi-endianness
The word bi-endian, when said of hardware, denotes the capability of the machine to compute or pass data in either endian format.
Example
Suppose integer is stored as 4 bytes (For those who are using DOS based compilers such as C++ 3.0 , integer is 2 bytes) then a variable x with value 0x01234567 will be stored as following.
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/little-and-big-endian-mystery
Historically, various methods of endianness have been used in computing, including exotic forms such as middle-endianness. Today, however, big-endianness is the dominant ordering in networking protocols (IP, TCP, UDP). Conversely, little-endianness is the dominant ordering for processor architectures (x86, most ARM implementations) and their associated memory.File formats can use either ordering; some formats use a mixture of both.
In left-to-right scripts, numbers are written with their digits in big-endian order. Similarly, programming languages use big-endian digit ordering for numeric literals as well as big-endian language ("left" and "right") for bit-shift operations, regardless of the endianness of the target architecture. This can lead to confusion when interacting with little-endian numbers.
