Henning Brunzel wrote on 1999-12-18 13:41 UTC:
A17. Network byte ordering (most significant byte first or big-endian) is
^ ^
| |
Isn't this a conflict? Doesn't big-endian mean, the most significant
byte comes last? Sorry, if I'm plainly wrong.
You are plainly wrong. Bigendians are politicians in Guliver's Travels
(by Jonathan Switft), who fight wars against the Littleendians. The wars
are about the question, whether cooked eggs are to be opened at the big
end or at the little end of the egg first. There is a beautiful drawing
on this scene on the title page of IEEE Micro, Vol. 3, No. 4, August
1983.
The terms were first introduced in computer science in the classic paper
Danny Cohen: On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace. Computer,
Vol. 14, No. 10, IEEE Computer Society, October 1981, pp. 48--54.
Bigendian computer scientists send the most significant bit or byte (=
"end") first or store it at the earlier (= lower) address. Little
Endians do it the other way round. Hubert Kirrmann introduced in IEEE
Micro, Vol. 3, No. 4, August 1983, pp. 32--47 also the terms "Madendian"
and "Sadendian" for even more perverse byte orderings that show up on
some types of multiprocessor busses.
More references and discussion on this topic in
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/aes-endian.pdf
Markus
--
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
