Archive for September 2010
Endianness and you
Posted 30/09/2010
on:Programming is all about generalizations. We, as programmers, usually do not want to worry about all the small details; We will usually assume that there’s enough physical memory on the machine, we will knowingly use cross-platform libraries to make the operating system we’re running on irrelevant as well, and sometimes we will even resort to using programming languages that take these ideas to the extreme – like i.e. Java, which runs entirely on a virtual machine — making all above issues non-existant.
But there comes a time, especially in low-level programming languages (like C++ luckily is), when we simply cannot ignore certain low level details. One such example is the expected, architecture specific, Endianness.
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