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The Origin of the Terms Big-Endian and Little-Endian (2003)

ling.upenn.edu

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Re: The Origin of the Terms Big-Endian and Little-Endian (2003)

#21

Post by dontlaugh »

nineteen999 wrote: post #19
dontlaugh wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UDP is an implementation detail of QUIC, just a way to give IP-ish functionality to userspace. In practice, QUIC is a TCP alternative. The OSI layer model is not necessarily as relevant as it used to be.

You're kind of saying "look over here!" but I'm not that easily distracted. You said "Which will also become a historical artifact as new protocols are made to use little endian". It's never going to become a historical artifact in our lifetimes. As the peer poster pointed out, QUIC itself has big-endian header fields. IPv4/IPv6 both use big-endian at layer 3. The OSI layer model is extremely relevant to the Cisco ne…

I was wrong about QUIC, for some reason I was sure I'd read it's little-endian.

I'm just pointing out that UDP is an extremely thin wrapper over IP and the preferred way of implementing new protocols. It seems likely we'll eventually replace at least some of our protocols and deprecate old ones and I was under the impression new ones tended to be little endian.

Re: The Origin of the Terms Big-Endian and Little-Endian (2003)

#22

Post by Veserv »

rep_lodsb wrote: post #11
weebull wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's one area I wish we did differently which I think is a hang-over from big-endian. It's the order of bytes when we write out hex dumps of memory. You'll always get something like this: ``` 00000000 : 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 00000008 : 08 09 0A 0B 0C 0D 0E 0F ``` On a big-endian machine, when you wrote 0x1234 to address 0x0000000 you got: ``` 00000000 : 12 34 02 03 04 05 06 07 00000008 : 08 09 0A 0B 0C 0D 0E 0F…

!tfel-ot-thgir eb dluow ,redro dleif sa llew sa ,sgnirts lla neht tuB It could be argued that little endian is the more natural way to write numbers anyway, for both humans and computers. The positional numbering system came to the West via Arabic, after all. Most of the confusion when reading hex dumps seems to arise from how the two nibbles of each byte being in the familiar left-to-right order clashes with the ord…

Yep. We even have a free bit when writing hex numbers like 0x1234. Just flip that 0x to a 1x to indicate you are writing in little-endian and you get nice numbers like 1x4321 that are totally unambiguous little-endian hex representations.

You can apply that same formatting to little-endian bit representations by using 1b instead of 0b and you could even do decimal representations by prefixing with 1d.

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