endianness (On Holy Wars)

programmingnetworking

The byte-ordering split whose names Danny Cohen borrowed from a satirical war in Gulliver's Travels.

In Swift's novel, Lilliput and Blefuscu go to war over whether to crack a boiled egg at its big or little end; Cohen's 1980 memo used Big-Endian and Little-Endian to needle engineers arguing just as fiercely over which byte comes first. The joke stuck, and the two terms are now the standard vocabulary for machine byte order.

Also known as: big-endian, little-endian, byte order, On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace

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