More Big Endian vs Little Endian

Remember, 16 bit hex is two digits at a time. so 01 = 1 and ff = 255 regardless of which endian you are using. It matters what order all your sets of two hex digits are set in that makes the difference in endian.

Decimal	Big Endian Hex	Little Endian Hex
1	0001	0100
2	0002	0200
...
14	000e	0e00
15	000f	0f00
16	0010	1000
17	0011	1100
..
31	001f	1f00
32	0020	2000
33	0021	2100
...
254	00fe	fe00
255	00ff	ff00
256	0100	0001
257	0101	0101
258	0102	0201

Big endian puts the most significant byte first (two places in hex) This is how western culture is used to seeing numbers represented.
01 = 0001 = 000001 = 00000001 = 1

Little endian puts the least significant byte first. Back-assword from normal.
01 = 0100 = 010000 = 01000000 = 1

Understanding the concept is nothing. The trouble is knowing when to switch between them. PPC chips are big endian if I remember right. X86 (the standard Intel/AMD) chips are little endian. Every frigging chip and board has a potential of switching for no good reason. You just have to know which you are dealing with. Some say little endian has an advantage because you can just keep tacking bytes on and getting bigger numbers. I've never heard of a useful program that used that. It seems they all define a byte count before doing anything. I don't know. I can't imagine a real advantage of one over the other.

For the first time in my life today, I had to write code that deals directly with this issue. Normally, I skirted the issue closely, but never had to dive in. I never had to count bits and bytes until this project. I feel all grown up. =]