Endianness
Learn about the little-endian and big-endian byte orders used by computers.
Introduction
We know that different data types have different sizes and that we typically measure that size in bytes.
For example, an integer has a size of 4 bytes. Therefore, to represent the integer in memory, we use a sequence of 4 bytes or 32 bits. Let’s say we want to represent the integer 2022
. The binary representation of 2022
is 11111100110
.
We need 11 bits to represent it, but we know an integer takes 32 bits, so to extend 11 bits to 32, we add 0
s as padding. Therefore, the full representation is 00000000000000000000011111100110
. Or, if we want to see the individual bytes, we can add some spacing after each group of 8 bits: 00000000 00000000 00000111 11100110
.
Let’s create a memory drawing and represent the bytes:
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