3 ms·

This might be the most stupid question of 2021, anyway, here it is: but in little-endian systems the order of the individual bits in a byte is still (kind of)

This might be the most stupid question of 2021, anyway, here it is: but in little-endian systems the order of the individual bits in a byte is still (kind of) big-endian, with the most meaningful bit on the left, right? Personally I always think first about how the single bits are stored in a byte, which is as far as I know, with the most important bit on the left, independently if the system is big- or little-endian, for example: === 0: 0000 0000 1: 0000 0001 2: 0000 0010 ... 255: 1111 1111 === Therefore if the number/value gets bigger than a byte for me it's just more natural to keep adding bits to the left of the sequence of bits (therefore big-endian style), for example: === 256: 1 0000 0000 257: 1 0000 0001 ... ===

ghusbands 5y ago
That amounts to the same question - the way we write binary numbers is the same way we write hexadecimal numbers, decimal numbers or numbers in any base; we start with the most significant. This makes the natural form for LTR languages big-endian. It has no bearing on the layout of bits in the RAM chips, caches, register files or data/address lines in a computer. Endianness pretty much only affects the operation of transferring values from/to memory.
- zepearl 5y ago
  Well, I can change the way I think/do stuff (I can write "1234" or "4321", no problem) but what I meant was basically "for me to make sense, byte-endianness should be aligned to bit-endianness"... . To me it would make sense to use little-endian if the same would be applied as well on the level of "bits" within a byte... . Using little-endian on a byte-level but big-endian on a bit-level (within a byte) is quite confusing for me. Just my subjective opinion.
yakubin 5y ago
> but in little-endian systems the order of the individual bits in a byte is still (kind of) big-endian, with the most meaningful bit on the left, right? Single bits are not addressable, so from the point of view of a programmer "order of bits" isn't well-defined. There isn't a way to distinguish endianness of bits for a programmer.

ghusbands 5y ago

That amounts to the same question - the way we write binary numbers is the same way we write hexadecimal numbers, decimal numbers or numbers in any base; we start with the most significant. This makes the natural form for LTR languages big-endian. It has no bearing on the layout of bits in the RAM chips, caches, register files or data/address lines in a computer. Endianness pretty much only affects the operation of transferring values from/to memory.

zepearl 5y ago
Well, I can change the way I think/do stuff (I can write "1234" or "4321", no problem) but what I meant was basically "for me to make sense, byte-endianness should be aligned to bit-endianness"... . To me it would make sense to use little-endian if the same would be applied as well on the level of "bits" within a byte... . Using little-endian on a byte-level but big-endian on a bit-level (within a byte) is quite confusing for me. Just my subjective opinion.

yakubin 5y ago

> but in little-endian systems the order of the individual bits in a byte is still (kind of) big-endian, with the most meaningful bit on the left, right? Single bits are not addressable, so from the point of view of a programmer "order of bits" isn't well-defined. There isn't a way to distinguish endianness of bits for a programmer.