本文发表在 rolia.net 枫下论坛and 11010100 is actually little endian. Notice that in little endian, not only is the byte order reversed, but also is the bit order . Usually for char type, you don't care wether it's a big endian or little endian, but in the case of bit field, such as the header structure for a DNS query, you need to consider the "endianess" of the machine and throw in the conditional compile flag, check out the /usr/include/arpa/nameser.h or ip.h(I forgot the path) for the definition of network packet structures, they all have conditional compile flags.
2) mostly for integral types, for float or double types, usually they have a coprocessor which has its' own way of storing floats and doubles. That's why in Real-time operation, usualy people avoid float arithematics because it will slow down the whole process significantly.
3) compilers play an important role in correct data generation for machines with different byte order, in case of ELF dynamic link file format, a compiler will make sure that the byte order and alignment of data agree with the architecture. Of course, different compilers for the same machine generate different binary codes, but the byte order of the data should stay the same.更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net

本文发表在 rolia.net 枫下论坛The term is used because of an analogy with the story Gulliver's Travels, in which Jonathan Swift imagined a never-ending fight between the kingdoms of the Big-Endians and the Little-Endians, whose only difference is in where they crack open a hard-boiled egg.

Big Endian:
A colorful way of describing the sequence in which MULTIBYTE numbers are stored in a computer's memory.

Storing the most significant byte in the lowest memory address, which is the address of the data. Since TCP defines the byte ordering for network data, end-nodes
must call a processor-specific convert utility (which would do nothing if the machine's native byte-ordering is the same as TCP's) that acts on the TCP and IP
header information only. In a TCP/IP packet, the first transmitted data is the most significant byte.

Most UNIXes (for example, all System V) and the Internet are Big Endian. Motorola 680x0 microprocessors (and therefore Macintoshes), Hewlett-Packard
PA-RISC, and Sun SuperSPARC processors are Big Endian. The Silicon Graphics MIPS and IBM/Motorola PowerPC processors are both Little and Big
Endian (bi-endian).



Little Endian:
Specifies that the least significant byte is stored in the lowest-memory address, which is the address of the data.

The Intel 80X86 and Pentium and DEC Alpha RISC processors are Little Endian.

Windows NT and OSF/1 are Little Endian.

Little Endian is the less common UNIX implementation.更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net