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Endianness

Posted: March 8th, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: technology | 3 Comments »

I’ve spent much of the week here at the client site talking about slick things like Endianness. When I was in meetings, I kept thinking that they were talking about Big Indian, Little Indian. Being Indian, I was really confused. Of course, they were saying “Big Endian, Little Endian.”

The etymology is interesting:
The choice of big-endian vs. little endian has been the subject of flame wars. The very term big-endian comes from Jonathan Swift’s satiric novel Gulliver’s Travels, where tensions are described in Lilliput and Blefuscu because a faction called the Big-endians prefer to crack open their soft-boiled eggs from the big end, contrary to Lilliputian royal edict. The terms little-endian and endianness have a similar ironic intent. – wikipedia
Looks like I have 18 more weeks of tech-speak in front of me. The project is actually pretty interesting, despite being completely unrelated to my past experience/strengths.

I’m flying back today, through Dallas, since XNA is the hardest airport to fly into in America.


3 Comments on “Endianness”

  1. 1 tracers said at 2:52 am on March 9th, 2007:

    w00t!

  2. 2 Alejo said at 3:48 pm on March 12th, 2007:

    Hahahah, that’s a funny post. :-)

    I’m sure we’ll all be learning lots of stuff on this project.

  3. 3 Benjamin said at 12:58 pm on March 13th, 2007:

    I lost a couple days of my life once learning the hard way that C is little endian while Java is big endian (or was it the other way around?).


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